Page 6271 – Christianity Today (2024)

Ideas

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For centuries man has questioned whether life exists on other worlds. Do intelligent beings exist on Venus with her dense clouds and relatively moderate temperatures? Do the “canals” of Mars witness to human engineering as Percival Lowell maintained? And what of the other planetary systems throughout the universe, and of the other island universes, the spiral nebulae, which are scattered across the inconceivable vastness of space? Has man any right to assume that intelligent life exists solely on his “small and insignificant planet”?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is making no such assumption. Beginning this fall and continuing at least into 1964, the NASA will launch a series of space probes toward Mars and Venus, the planets of our solar system most likely to yield evidence of life. The first of these experiments, Mariner II, which carries a 450-pound load of instruments, has now been launched on a three-month, 35-million-mile voyage toward Venus. If all goes as anticipated, the unmanned space craft will pass within 10,000 miles of the foggy planet and will radio back valuable information of its environment before going into orbit around the sun. In the months and years ahead subsequent probes will attempt to land instruments on both Mars and Venus, their Lilliputian instruments analyzing the soil and atmosphere and relaying the discovery of living organisms or their by-products to earth. It seems possible, therefore, that man will soon know whether life exists elsewhere within his solar system.

What import will these findings hold for Christian theology? If no life is discovered on either Mars or Venus, man on earth remains in the estimate of some researchers but a small activated speck in the myriads of worlds which occupy space. How can he believe that the compassion and activity of the Creator have been centered on this world for his particular benefit? More bluntly, the German Spencer once asked if we can believe that “the Cause to which we can put no limits in space or time, and of which our entire solar system is a relatively infinitesimal product, took the disguise of a man for the purpose of covenanting with a shepherd-chief in Syria.”

If man should discover life somewhere in the reaches of space, however, this too raises questions for a theology which views the earth as the stage of God’s great drama of creation and redemption. If this life is intelligent, can it be sinful? If it is sinful, does this not detract from the absolute nature of our Lord’s atonement? Or did Christ die for these beings also, thereby leaving us with a missionary imperative for their conversion? Will we one day have a David Livingstone for Mars?

Neither of the dilemmas posed by this alternative is as problematic for Christian theology as many have supposed. It is to be observed first that the Christian Church has never maintained that mankind is the sole species of intelligent created beings in the universe. On the contrary, Scripture speaks frequently of both angels and demons, and of these in such large numbers as to overwhelm imagination. These beings, we may suppose, have access to all parts of the material universe. Secondly, should other worlds possess other sinful beings—which seems improbable—the fact is hardly disruptive of evangelical theology. To suppose that there are other inhabited worlds, even thousands of them, does not detract in the slightest from the value of the soul in this one. “Man is not less great,” said Scotland’s James Orr, “because he is not alone great. If he is a spiritual being,—if he has a soul of infinite worth, which is the Christian assumption,—that fact is not affected though there were a whole universe of other spiritual beings.” In such circ*mstances the atonement of our Lord is not less significant because it occurred in this world for the redemption of mankind. The “good news” would be as welcome on Venus or Mars as upon the farthest reaches of the earth.

If it should be demonstrated that life exists solely on the earth—a demonstration which appears impossible by our present scientific resources—then how significant is this! If this world alone is overcome by sin, then it is worthy of God to redeem it. This is certainly the teaching of Christ’s parable of the lost sheep. Though all the flock but one was safe, the compassion of the shepherd drove him to rescue that one. Certainly among the joys of the Christian life is to know that God’s love extends even to us, regardless of how insignificant we may be by human or by cosmic standards.

But the final reply to the objections which see the existence or non-existence of life on other planets as detrimental to the uniqueness of the biblical revelation is this: the scope of God’s purpose on this small planet is not confined to man alone, but it includes the whole of creation. Christ’s death and resurrection and the living of the Christian life by those who attempt to follow him are eternally significant. Peter tells us that even the angels desire to know these things. Paul reminds us that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.” On a scale of such grandeur man is not reduced to insignificance. Rather he becomes eternally and infinitely important, just as his Creator by the incarnation and death of his Son has revealed that he regards him. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

What will man discover on other planets if God permits him to journey there? It is impossible to say. But one thing is certain. He will export his sin with him. And wherever that takes place, the Gospel of Christ will be forever relevant—on Mars, on Venus or throughout the infinite reaches of space.

Confusion Over Criteria A Sign That Morality Is Declining

A recent Saturday Evening Post editorial confesses, “We do not know how anyone would begin to measure the morality of 185,000,000 people.” But this admitted inability does not restrain the Post even momentarily from an assessment of our national morality. It declares that human morality has not changed since the days of Eve and that public voices decrying a progressive moral decay in America are pessimistically generalizing on moral exceptions.

This emphasis on the lack of assured criteria to judge the morality of the American people is apparently voiced to undercut the disturbing multiplication of publicly voiced judgments about moral decay, and to support more optimistic assessments. Yet the confession is a boomerang, disqualifying any writer from rendering verdict on “‘Moral Decay’ in America.”

There are of course ways of measuring a nation’s morality and means for detecting whether progressive moral decay is present. One legitimate manner is to consider the things of which a nation is ashamed. Of some things decent men and decent societies have always been ashamed. hom*osexuality is one of them. The shame about hom*osexuality is not that the practice today is being faced and dealt with. This is all to the good. The shame is rather that its practice is being increasingly and openly admitted and discussed without shame.

In June the Supreme Court reversed a Post Office decision to ban three male magazines featuring male nudes and designed to appeal to hom*osexuals. The decision seems not to have embarrassed the American public. But even more striking evidence of the fadeout of the earlier shame associated with hom*osexuality is the request for open, public discussions of hom*osexuality on radio and television. And the request comes not from preachers and moralists, but from hom*osexuals themselves. They desire to confront the public with the subject at the corner magazine stands. They also desire to carry their case into the American homes so that they can there plead their claim to be normal people before as vast an audience as possible. Such discussions have already occurred on both West Coast TV and radio. Recently a radio station in the East carried a panel discussion on the subject by eight hom*osexuals. The program, according to The New York Times, was believed to be the first of its kind in the New York area. Who brought this “first” about? The public relations director of the hom*osexual League of America who protested to the station that hom*osexuals were a minority not receiving their share of time on the air!

Is the moral climate in America changing? When the change in climate is great and abrupt, no delicate or as yet unmade instruments are needed to make the detection and to assess the change. A man on the street with a wet finger in the wind is enough.

German Scholars Turning From Bultmann’S Theories

For over a decade Rudolph Bultmann has held theological preeminence on the European continent. Valid and persistent criticism has failed to dislodge his theories in favor of other theological approaches. Now, however, indications are multiplying that previously scattered critiques of Bultmann’s theology are encouraging desertion of Bultmann’s premises and even of the “Form Criticism” on which he builds. It is not so much a primary dissatisfaction with Bultmann’s existential approach to Christian theology, nor even with Formgeschichte itself, that lies at the basis of this revolt, but a growing awareness of his inadequate handling of New Testament data and the resulting instability of his theology.

The revolt against Bultmannism is more and more evident among New Testament scholars. Writing for the June issue of Theologische Literaturzeitung (founded in 1875 by Emil Schurer and Adolf von Harnack), Johannes Schneider, retired professor of New Testament in East Berlin’s Humboldt University, tells the theological world that an influential school of theologians is insistently reviving the question: Does the communication of the Gospel as recorded in the New Testament have its source in the Sitz im Leben of the early Church, as Bultmann has maintained, or is this source to be discovered in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ himself? Among such newly influential theologians Schneider names S. and E. Fascher, Jean de Fraine, H. Risenfeld, W. Manson, H. Schumann and Oscar Cullmann.

The nature of the New Testament Church is crucial for Bultmann’s approach to New Testament theology. Operating under the assumption of the Formgeschichteschool—that a period of oral transmission of the Gospel message intervened between the years of Christ’s ministry and the recording of the traditions in the New Testament Scriptures—Bultmann envisions a creative church, which superimposed its own world picture upon what it had received of the times and teachings of Jesus. Because of the resulting distortion, Bultmann deems it necessary to reject the New Testament “mythology” and to ask again, in contemporary terms, what the life of Christ must mean for us today. On his premises Scripture is in no sense an historically accurate picture of Jesus Christ nor of the content or significance of his teaching.

But is Bultmann’s picture of the early Church correct? Not according to the theologians cited by Schneider. How could a small and insignificant Church, composed largely of simple, lower-class people, create the sublime theology of the New Testament Scriptures? It is surely more accurate to affirm, as does Risenfeld, that the Church was the recipient of the tradition and not the creator of it, a tradition received from eyewitnesses, who had received their teaching from Christ, and preserved with the same attention to detail that was characteristic of the Jewish synagogue.

But Bultmann is vulnerable on other counts as well. If a corrected understanding of the early Church must see in it a recipient of the Gospel traditions and not a creator of them, then Bultmann is overlooking the obvious significance of Jesus Christ as teacher. Rabbilike, Jesus must have impressed his words upon his disciples, to the point of sheer memorization, commanding them to teach what he had taught them in his lifetime. From the very beginning, therefore, the Gospel message consisted of more than a sole proclamation of the Cross and Resurrection. It must have included Christ’s ethics, his parables, and his teachings about the Kingdom. Secondly, Bultmann seems blind in his arbitrary rejection of the Messianic consciousness of Christ. How were unlearned disciples to understand the meaning of the cross if Jesus had not declared the significance of his ministry and his death to them beforehand? There could be a post-Easter confession among the disciples, as Schurmann has maintained, only because there was a pre-Easter confession of Christ as Lord and Saviour.

American theology has always followed puppy-dog-like behind the giants of the European schools. Will American theology be found still imitating Bultmann long after he has lost significance on the European continent? Schneider feels that the new theological trend may in time overthrow the seeming certainties of research, the “ruling” concepts of European theology, and revive an almost dogma-like view of the early Christian transmission. American theologians could yet lead the way in a return to a sound view of Scripture, and in so doing bring to the confused religious scene a more authentic picture of the life and ministry and teaching of the Son of God.

Salute To A Champion Of Constitutional Government

The marble halls of the Supreme Court building now echo an emptiness which reaches to the far corners of the nation. The retirement of Justice Felix Frankfurter after 23 years of distinguished service to his country takes from the bench one of the most influential judges of this generation. His brilliance, his ebullience, his legal precision—these will be sorely missed, for he put them in the service of an ideal which, in global perspective, has come upon hard times: the maintenance of government by law rather than by men. Today this ideal is confronted the world over by men on white horses followed closely by tanks.

Justice Frankfurter’s career reflects a certain irony. His appointment by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 occasioned fears on the part of conservatives, who would later come to hail him as a bulwark on the court for constitutional government. For though he was, and remained, a liberal in his own social and political views, his elevation to the court produced a champion of the separation of inherent powers of the different branches of government. He would thus vote to uphold laws he personally thought unwise. He called for judicial restraint in deference to federal and state legislators. “It is not easy,” he once wrote, “to stand aloof and allow want of wisdom to prevail.… But it is not the business of this court to pronounce policy.”

Frankfurter is a Jew, and President Kennedy followed political custom in naming as his successor Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg, who is also Jewish. And like Frankfurter, Goldberg is noted as a legal technician and is a liberal. Formerly a labor lawyer, he managed to shed the label of labor spokesman once he assumed his cabinet post. What posture he will take in response to his new duties, may well be decisive in major issues to confront a divided court.

Public Welfare Versus The Welfare State

There is a vast difference between the responsibility of government to promote and to protect the public welfare and the adoption of those measures which create a “welfare state.”

Every government must promulgate and enforce laws to protect its citizens. These laws concern sanitation, the prevention of disease, the rights of business, and of labor, and the general protection which is necessary for the living of a peaceful and normal human life. Such laws promote the public welfare. The government establishes these laws, and it arbitrates them. It lays down the rules of the game and then, like an umpire, insures that they are followed by the players.

The welfare state operates on a different principle. It believes that the government is wiser than the people, that it is better able to provide for them than the people are to provide for themselves. In this situation the “umpire” attempts to play the game himself, not only making the rules but also competing with the players.

Unfortunately, the concept of the welfare state seems to be gaining strength within our country, and we are beset on every side by its effects. We witness the mirage of federal aid, so dear to the politician and so misleading. As emergency measures tend to resolve themselves into continuing programs, federal aid leads more and more to the feeling that the government owes its citizens a living. We note inefficiency and waste in government bureaucracy. This has been startlingly illustrated by the cost of $9,000 per Peace Corpsman as compared to $2,000 for missionaries of the major denominational boards. On many fronts we note the prevailing philosophy that the people can and should turn to the government for things which they, as individuals or states or communities, should be doing for themselves.

When people exchange freedom for security they have taken the first step toward an internal decadance. The next step is taken when the loss of initiative occurs in favor of dependence. The final stage witnesses corruption through stagnation.

The measures of the welfare state do something deep down to character itself. If the Christian does not resist them, who will?

L. Nelson Bell

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Faith and trust are not synonymous, although in some aspects they may be.

We trust in God because we believe he is faithful. We have confidence in him because we believe he is able to do that which he has promised.

We have confidence in him because of who he is and what he has revealed about himself in word and action.

We depend on him because we believe he is wholly dependable.

One fine distinction that may exist between faith and trust is that which is found between action based on faith and the object of faith itself.

The writer to the Hebrews describes faith as follows: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (RSV); “Now faith means putting our full confidence in the things we hope for, it means being certain of things we cannot see” (Phillips); “But faith forms a solid ground for what is hoped for, a conviction of unseen realities” (Berkeley); “Now faith is the title-deed to things hoped for; the putting to proof of things not seen” (Weymouth); “Now faith means we are confident of what we hope for, convinced of what we do not see” (Moffatt).

From these and other translations we get a clear view of the meaning of faith. Therefore, in a very real sense trust is putting faith into practice. The antithesis of faith based on the revelation of God is its rejection in favor of human reason.

We have before us a letter inveighing against both the integrity and authority of the Bible. In it the writer says: “Our judgment on these things we must make for ourselves, and there is no finality, no authority, to which we have recourse other than an honest appraisal of our own experience, and knowledge of our time.”

Here there is stated the difference between faith and reason. Faith steps out and believes things it can neither see nor prove by human standards. Human reason, right and good when exercised under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, stands however on quicksands when it rejects those things which it cannot prove by the measurements of worldly values and concepts.

The Bible tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God. It tells us that the just shall live by faith.

Faith is necessary because God cannot be judged by human values, nor can he be brought within the confines of our puny imaginations. The heavens declare the glory of God but the immensity of space, along with many other elements of his creation, must be accepted by faith because they go beyond human comprehension.

Proceeding then from such faith there comes a tranquillity of life which none but the Christian can know. As the Psalmist says: “Blessed is the man that maketh the Lord his trust” (Ps. 40:4a). This blessedness, or happiness, proceeds from confidence in the one trusted. When there is no such object of confidence, or an inadequate faith in him, such blessedness is impossible.

We have heard the story of the wayfarer carrying a heavy burden. When taken up into a cart by a kindly farmer he continued to carry the load on his back. On being questioned he said, “You have been so kind to pick me up, I cannot impose on you by laying down my burden in the cart.” Humorous? Just about as humorous as our failure to avail ourselves of the blessings of perfect trust. Too few of us heed Peter’s admonition: “Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you” (1 Pet. 5:7, RSV).

The completeness of God’s provision for his children is an unending marvel; our failure to take advantage of this provision is life’s greatest source of frustration and futility.

The Psalmist exclaims: “O how abundant is thy goodness, which thou hast laid up for those who fear thee, and wrought for those who take refuge in thee, in the sight of the sons of men!” (Ps. 31:19, RSV).

What greater evidence of the reality of God can confront nonbelievers than Christians stepping out on the greatness and the promises of God in simple trust and faith?

Life’s problems are legion and God has never promised that the Christian shall be free from them. Rather, he promises grace and wisdom to meet them for our good and for his glory. “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods!” (Ps. 40:4, RSV).

An illustration of the blindness and perversity of human nature is our willingness to trust in things which are transient in their nature.

Unquestionably money gives a sense of security, and Christians are often tempted to measure the degree of God’s blessings in terms of wealth. Once such a temptation is overcome and trust is based on the One to whom all riches belong, a new sense of security is ours.

Other things beckon us to trust: position, power, intellectual abilities and attainments. All of these have their rightful place, but once the center of gravity of our faith shifts from the everlasting God to anything in this world we will find ourselves confronted with the solemn fact that we have sold our birthright of the Eternal for the pottage of the temporal: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever” (1 John 2:16, 17, RSV).

King Hezekiah set us Christians an example, for of him it is said: “He trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the Lord; he did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments, which the Lord commanded Moses” (2 Kings 18:5, 6, RSV).

God intends our trust to be active as well as passive. He expects us to “rest in the Lord,” and he also expects us to be “up and about our Father’s business.”

Faith and trust in God are the anchors to which we cling, the bases from which we act, the certainties on which we carry out our daily tasks.

The apostle Paul passed through almost every vicissitude of life, but his faith sustained him. Writing to the Corinthian Christians he says: “But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9).

We live in times when unbelievers are deeply disturbed about world trends and events. This is a time for Christians to demonstrate that their faith is immovable—to show to others that our trust is in the eternal, sovereign and loving God.

This is a testimony the world needs to see.

We are not far removed from the time when in theological circles eschatological themes were considered unimportant and irrelevant. An apocalyptic world and a new emphasis on biblical theology have combined to change radically this situation. Theologians have again been brought to consider soberly the great eschatological themes of the New Testament and to ponder carefully their meaning and significance for our age. Two of the most important of these eschatological themes are the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment.

The Resurrection of the Dead. Although belief in the resurrection of the dead has been generally unacceptable to both ancient and modern man, A. M. Ramsey is right when he says that for Christianity to have succumbed to the opponents of this truth would have been disastrous for the Church. “It would have blunted the cutting edge of the Gospel and removed a doctrine which sums up the genius of Christianity in its belief about man and the world” (The Resurrection of Christ, p. 100). Indeed, Reinhold Niebuhr states that “there is no part of the Apostolic Creed which … expresses the whole genius of the Christian faith more neatly than … ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body’” (Beyond Tragedy, p. 290).

The Old Testament is strangely silent about the future life. It has been suggested that this silence may have been a reaction against the Canaanite cults of the dead. Whatever the reason, the Old Testament usually describes the afterlife in terms of a shadowy existence in Sheol, the abode of the dead. When it does speak of resurrection, most often it is the resurrection of the nation, as distinguished from the individual, which is in mind. The well-known “valley of dry bones” passage in Ezekiel 37 and probably the resurrection passage in the Isaiah apocalypse (26:19) fit into this category. The only clear statement of a resurrection for individuals is Daniel 12:2: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

Significant developments in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body took place during the inter-testament period, particularly during the time of the Maccabees. The intense suffering and persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes provided a stimulus for the further refinement of this doctrine. This is most evident in such apocryphal books as the Wisdom of Solomon and II Maccabees, and the pseudepigraphical Psalms of Solomon and I Enoch.

It is not until we reach the New Testament that the full flower of belief in the resurrection of the dead appears. References to it appear in every stratum of the New Testament, from the words of Jesus as found in the Synoptics to the visions of the seer in the Apocalypse.

The basis of all New Testament belief in the resurrection of the dead is the fact of Christ’s resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15 is the classic passage. Paul’s answer to those who denied a future resurrection was Christ’s resurrection. “Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised” (1 Cor. 15:12, 13). But Christ has been raised and has become “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (v. 20).

Dr. Cullmann has underscored the difference between the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul and the biblical concept of the resurrection of the dead (Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?). The Bible does not embrace the Greek dualism of body and soul. The human body, in biblical thought, resulted from the creative activity of God, and as such is good. Thus man is not conceived of as a soul housed in an evil body from which he constantly seeks release. He is a body-soul, and the redemptive process includes his material as well as his immaterial self—a process climaxed by the resurrection of the body.

Very little is said by Jesus about the nature of the resurrection body. His most significant statement arises in answer to the question of the Sadducees as to whose wife the woman would be in the resurrection, who had married seven brothers in succession. Jesus replied that because of an inadequate knowledge of the Scriptures and the power of God they were wrongly limiting the conditions of the future life to those of the present. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). Resurrection life is of a new and different order of existence.

The Apostle Paul says essentially the same thing in 1 Corinthians 15:35–50 in answer to the questions: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” These were pertinent questions at Corinth since the Greeks denied the resurrection of the body on the ground that corruptibility and bodily existence could not be disassociated. How could the future life have anything to do with a corruptible body? Paul concedes that the earthly body of man is corruptible (“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” v. 50).

But there is more than one kind of body. Although the resurrection body has a certain continuity with the earthly body (Paul likens this continuity to that between the seed which is planted and the ear of grain which springs from it), yet there is a vast difference between the present body and the resurrection body. This difference is emphasized in a series of contrasts in verses 42–44: “… What is sown [our earthly bodies] is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.…” Corruptibility, dishonor, weakness, and a psychical (AV “natural”) nature are all ascribed to our earthly body. In contrast, incorruptibility, glory, power, and spirituality (pneumatikos) are ascribed to the resurrection body.

This last mentioned characteristic has led to much misunderstanding. How can a body be “spiritual”? G. E. Ladd’s answer is to the point: “The ‘spiritual body’ of 1 Corinthians 15:44 is not a body made of spirit, anymore than the ‘natural’ (literally, psychical) body is a body made of psyche.… However, it is a literal, real body, even though it is adapted to the new order of existence which shall be inaugurated at the resurrection for those who experience it” (Crucial Questions Concerning the Kingdom of God, p. 139). “Spiritual” in this context is probably best taken to mean “dominated by the Holy Spirit,” or perhaps as Leon Morris suggests, “adapted to the needs of the spirit” [i. e., the human spirit]. “The spiritual body … is the organ which is intimately related to the spirit of man, just as his present body is intimately related to his earthly life” (The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, p. 228). Whatever “spiritual” means here, Paul is convinced that the future life will be so glorious that our present earthly bodies will have to be radically changed in order for us fully to enjoy what God has prepared for us (cf. Phil. 3:20, 21).

Although all evangelicals believe that the resurrection of the dead will be closely associated with the return of Christ (cf. Phil. 3:20, 21), there are numerous differences in details. Some hold to one general resurrection of all men at Christ’s return. Others, on the basis of Revelation 20 in particular (cf. also John 5:29; Phil. 3:11; 1 Cor. 15:23), see two resurrections, one (of just men) at Christ’s return but before the millennium, the other (of the unjust) at the end of that period. Dispensationalists split the first resurrection into two phases consistent with their theory of a pretribulation “rapture” and a post-tribulation “revelation.” Differences in details there are, but these do not prevent evangelicals from unitedly affirming, “We believe in the resurrection of the body.”

The Final Judgment. Closely associated with the resurrection of the dead is the final judgment. Our Lord declared: “… the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28, 29).

The New Testament idea of the final judgment arises out of the Old Testament concept of the Day of the Lord. That Day is the final crisis (the English word “crisis” is simply the transliterated Greek word for judgment) of history when God will judge all men, with blessing for the faithful and destruction for the wicked.

Judgment is an essential part of biblical religion. In both the Old and New Testaments it inevitably arises out of the nature of God as righteous. A righteous God must judge sin and reward obedience.

The judge is none other than God himself and his agent in judgment is Jesus Christ, the Son. Thus God “has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained” (Acts 17:31), and the Father has given to the Son “authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man” (John 5:27).

The judgment effected by God through Christ is universal. All men must stand before God’s judgment bar (Rom. 2:6–10). This includes Christians (2 Cor. 5:10; Rom. 14:10) as well as non-Christians (Rev. 20:15). Whereas it is true that he who believes in Jesus will not experience condemnation (John 5:24), for “there is no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1), these statements are not to be taken to mean that for the Christian there is no future judgment at all. Paul specifically states that “we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” (Rom. 14:10), and “all” in this context means “all Christians.” The Christian, however, can face the judgment with confidence (1 John 4:17). Christ’s redemptive work has already acquitted him. It was Thomas à Kempis who said: “The sign of the cross shall be in heaven when the Lord cometh to judgment.”

Judgment of Christians will be based on works (2 Cor. 5:10). The work of some Christians will prove to be superficial (“wood, hay, stubble”). “The Day will disclose it,” and it will be destroyed, but the believer himself will be saved, but “only as through fire” (1 Cor. 3:12–15). Alan Richardson is right when he says that this “works judgment” for Christians “is no mere relic of Paul’s Pharisaic ideology; it is no unconscious clinging to a doctrine of works. It is an assertion of the seriousness of the moral struggle of the Christian life …” (An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament, p. 342). In this judgment Christ’s verdict of blame or praise is itself the punishment or reward (Matt. 25:21, 23; Luke 19:17; cf. 22:61, 62).

The final judgment is the climax to a process of judgment which was actually inaugurated by the entrance of Jesus Christ into human history. “For judgment,” said Jesus, “I am come into the world” (John 9:39). This present aspect of the final judgment is particularly stressed in John’s Gospel. He that does not believe in the Son “is condemned already because he has not believed on the name of the Son of God” (3:18). The final judgment has already begun, and its basis is belief in Jesus. The same teaching is found in the Synoptics: “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38; cf. Matt. 10:32, 33; Luke 12:8, 9).

There are some passages (cf. the “Great Assize” passage of Matt. 25:31–46; Rom. 2:6–10) that emphasize works as the basis for the judgment of the unbeliever (as well as the believer). Stauffer understands these passages to refer to those who “have rejected the work of Christ and relied upon their own achievements, and on their achievements they will be judged.… But such a judgment will lead inevitably to condemnation, for even the noblest needs and characteristics are tainted with the poison of self-sufficiency …” (New Testament Theology, pp. 221, 222).

No uncertainty exists about the outcome of the final judgment. Both in the teachings of Jesus and in the writings of the apostles the ultimate fate of those who persist in their rebellion against God is eternal condemnation (Matt. 25:31, 46; 2 Thess. 1:7–10; Rev. 20:14, 15).

Differences, similar to those that exist concerning the resurrection of the dead, are found among evangelicals relative to the precise time and number of judgments. But unanimity exists on the great fact of the final judgment—a judgment that involves the end of history and the ultimate separation of souls.

The biblical doctrines of the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment have powerful practical implications for the Christian. Although he anticipates with joy the consummation of his redemption at the resurrection, and the revelation of the lordship of Christ at the final judgment, aspects of the latter have sobering elements. He must stand before Christ to be judged on the quality of his Christian life—a potent incentive for holy living! All men must face the same Lord to be judged on the basis of the gospel of God’s grace—an urgent plea for an increased effort in the proclamation of the truth concerning Jesus Christ, in whom there is no condemnation. How true it is that eschatology and ethics can never be disassociated; but neither can eschatology and evangelistic concern!

Bibliography: P. Althaus, Die letzten Dinge; O. Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?; T. A. Kantonen, The Christian Hope; H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul’s Conception of the Last Things; W. Milligan, The Resurrection of the Dead; S. D. F. Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality; R. Summers, The Life Beyond; G. Vos, The Pauline Eschatology; G. Kittel, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament—relevant articles.

Professor of Biblical Literature

Bethel College

St. Paul, Minnesota

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D. F. Busby

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Cooperative ministry—Much has been made of the fact that the Anglo-Saxon word from which our words hale, whole, and healthy are derived is the same word from which comes the word holy. Similarly salvation and salve are said to be linked, and Scripture speaks of “balm in Gilead.”

The problem of the interrelationship between sin and sickness certainly continues to loom as a practical problem in the experience of every sufferer and the aim and rationale of the person ministering to him is certainly no less important than his manner and method. For example, when the person with pneumonia asks the perennial question “Why did this happen to me?” or more particularly “Does this have to happen to me?” implying whether or not this sickness can and should be removed now and avoided in the future, the minister and the doctor are naturally liable to think, speak and act in widely variable if not diametrically opposite fashions, deriving from their different callings and conceptualizations.

Even the language is different—and here I am not referring to the temperamental surgeon’s proverbial tendency to use an abundance of dubious expletives whether exceedingly rare or disgustingly common. But the jargonic (if there is such a word) variations need no further emphasis at this time except to say it is amazing how two people can speak the same language so differently. This is especially true in my field of psychiatry where a number of common terms with differing definitions pose a real threat to communication. For example the term “conversion” and the more loosely used “guilt complex.” At least one motivation for our differing jargons is the principle of “condensation,” which is putting into a few compound words a number of different concepts which may thus be expressed simultaneously, saving time and space of explanations. An example from your theological field would be infra-and supralapsarianism, and examples from our field would be paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea, polymorphonuclear neutrophilic leucocyte, or unilateral multilocular pseudo-mucinous cystadenocarcinoma. Professional men have no corner on this. My brother, an ordinary business man, belongs to an organization that has us “beaten all hollow”: S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A., Inc. (Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc.).

Despite and sometimes even because of our differing goals and methods I want to stand up and be counted as favoring a holistic view of man and his ills and a collaborative method of ministration best carried out by conferences with ministerial groups followed up by individual conferences such as the practice of lunches with pastors. The holistic view holds that all aspects of man’s nature, including physical, psychological and spiritual, react together as a unit in health and in sickness. Thus though factors contributing to disturbance or disorder may arise primarily in one aspect of man’s nature and the symptoms become manifest in another aspect, ultimately all aspects are affected and adequate treatment requires ministration to all causative factors.—D. F. BUSBY, M.D., Niles, Illinois, to Christian Reformed ministers in Grand Rapids.

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Less Spigot

For every top-level preacher who speaks Ecclesian in the pulpit there are three score and ten parishioners whose speech problem is at the other end of the scale. Great swelling words are not their difficulty. They can’t manage any words at all. They are the manly mumblers.

Manly mumbling is a male malady. There are two varieties. The first is the muscular mumble, in which words are extruded under pressure between teeth clamped together by clenched masseter muscles. The tense belligerence which this conveys is accentuated by rippling these muscles occasionally, as though one were chewing on horsehide, or had his dentures fast in a caramel. The second mumble achieves a similar effect through opposite means. It is the drool mumble. The jaw is relaxed, and the lips have barely enough tension to contain saliva. Extreme ennui is indicated; this mumbler could care less, and does.

Both varieties are conscientiously developed in the middle or late teens to prove the mumbler’s masculinity in conformity to the tribal mores. Both add striking new confusions to our language.

I was fascinated to hear a student song leader ask a group, “The zany won half a fable-lit sung?” Someone did, and they sang what sounded like, “Freeze a jelly goof hello.” I met the young man later. When I was introduced he mumbled “Police tomato,” and moved away.

That sort of thing could lead to misunderstanding. Before tackling semantics and psychology in the communication of the Gospel we need to begin with peppermints and consonants. In the great assembly of Israel described in Nehemiah, Ezra the scribe and his colleagues “read in the book, in the law of God distinctly; and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading.” Clear thinking and speaking should go together.

Tongues were a problem in the early church. Paul warned the Corinthians that a stranger who heard their ecstatic utterances would think them mad. He insisted that those who used the gift in public must have an interpreter.

Perhaps your young people’s group needs an interpreter, too, for the mumblers. I suggest you test the candidate of your choice on this closing sentence:

A slang us in gushes sour linkage less spigot.

EUTYCHUS

In Free Europe

We are missionary appointees to France … now speaking in deputation services in California. We read your issue of July 20 on “Christianity in Free Europe” with great interest, as perhaps it is the finest combined writing on this subject in print today.

CHARLES M. WRIGHT

Greater Europe Mission

Long Beach, Calif.

With reference to the Rev. G. A. Had-jiantoniu’s article, “Greece and Eastern Orthodoxy,” … may I point out the most significant part that American Mission to Greeks has been having in recent years, bringing the Gospel to the entire nation.

It has pioneered in a unique method of evangelism, that of publishing as paid advertisem*nt full-length Gospel messages every week in nearly all secular newspapers and magazines of Greece. This has aroused the official opposition of the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church, who proposed that the government officially forbid me to write these messages. When this was turned down, they offered the newspapers a sum equal to what we are paying, if they would only keep our messages out. And when this also failed, they issued an encyclical in 640,000 copies, forbidding the people to read our Gospel messages. Needless to say that this had the exact opposite result.

In the town of Chalkis, I was sentenced to 49 days’ imprisonment, because a local newspaper published my Gospel messages, prefixing my name with the word Reverend. Local Archimandrite Christopher Kalyvas, along with the Greek Orthodox Church, took the attitude that Protestant ministers did not have the right to be called “Reverend” in Greece. This sentence was appealed and reversed by an Appellate Court in September, 1961.

Furthermore, American Mission to Greeks maintains a large printing establishment in the heart of Athens, employing twenty-six full-time printers, and publishes more new religious titles than any other religious publishing house in Greece. It maintains four evangelical bookstores throughout Greece.… In cooperation with the Million Testaments Campaigns, it has distributed many thousands of copies of the Word of God, and is now printing 100,000 at its own print shop in Athens.

American Mission to Greeks, furthermore, publishes the largest Greek evangelical magazine, the 60-page Voice of the Gospel, which now finds its place in the newsstands all over … Greece for the first time.

For the past three years, American Mission to Greeks has operated a booth at the International Fair at Thessalonica, distributing a million copies of literature and Scriptures to its visitors.

Furthermore, American Mission to Greeks is pioneering in film evangelism, producing the Moody Science Films in the Greek language, which are being shown even by Bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church.

SPIROS ZODHIATES

General Secretary

Baptism: Durable Debate

Tenney on “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper” (July 6 issue) touches on vital differences between Lutherans and other Protestants.

As a Lutheran myself, on one point I must fault both. This is on the meaning of the word baptizo. The Greek word baptizo never means “dip.” In “dip” an immediate withdrawal is implied, as might be in “plunge”; but those “baptized into Jesus Christ” or “into His death” are to stay there.

The word baptizo means the effecting of an immersion, fully or compendiously, whether by sinking, pouring, overflowing, or any other mode or method.

JAMES P. MAIER

Bethel Lutheran (Missouri Synod)

Sweet Home, Ore.

Although listing Oscar Cullmann’s Baptism in the New Testament in his bibliography, Tenney has not come to grips with the basic teaching of that excellent treatise.… He states: “Faith must precede commitment; the external act of water baptism will not transform an unbeliever into a Christian.” Cullmann demonstrates beyond a question of doubt that the “faith of the candidate is thus not a condition of the possibility of the divine action; nor is it a guarantee of the future perseverance of the person baptized” (p. 50). For the heathen adult faith acted as “a sign for the Church” (p. 50) that the person is worthy to receive the sacrament of baptism. The main activity of faith must follow, not precede, the reception of Christian baptism.… Instead of dismissing the possibility of infant baptism by stating that “The mention of the Philippian jailer’s household does not necessarily imply that infants were included,” [Tenney should] … have acknowledged with Cullmann that “natural membership (in) a Christian family conferred on him by his birth … is a sign for the Church that the divine baptismal event will in his case be completed, and that he Will really be incorporated in the Church of Christ” (p. 51)

MARVIN D. HOFF

Rea Avenue Reformed Church

Hawthorne, N. J.

Tobacco And The Ministry

In your July 6 issue under “Critic’s Notebook” (Eutychus), Dr. John Henry Jowett is included under prominent preachers and teachers who use tobacco. From the time of his first visit to this country in 1906 until he resigned his Fifth Avenue pulpit at the close of the First World War, I met with Dr. Jowett on a number of social occasions. I never saw him use tobacco and I greatly doubt if he qualifies among the list of smokers.

FRANK FITT

Ann Arbor, Mich.

May I direct the writer to an article quoted by Dr. Dale Oldham over The Christian Brotherhood Hour on October 15, 1961, and reprinted in The Gospel Trumpet (now Vital Christianity) the same date.

Here is the quote: “One Saturday morning Mr. Spurgeon went for a walk, and when he came back, he said to me, ‘I saw in a show window down the street a can of tobacco, and on it a printed card reading Spurgeon’s Tobacco.’ Then he asked, ‘When the Lord calls me home, shall I be remembered by the tobacco I smoked or by the Lord I preached? I can never smoke again to the glory of God.’ Immediately the preacher picked up all his smoking paraphernalia and threw it upon the fire. He never smoked again to the day of his death.”

May the tobacco-using ministers of our day accept Spurgeon as an example and, along with him, realize their “moment of truth.”

ESTON W. HUNTER

Church of God

Fillmore, Mo.

The letter reads: “I have never heard [a fellow minister] … who was a smoker advise young people to avoid beginning”.…

I have smoked a lifetime (now 68) and I still smoke but I do advise our youth against it. I am not bragging about my smoking. Why don’t I stop? That’s another subject.

DOWIE G. DE BOER

First Congregational Church

Brimfield, Mass.

We all know that in the grace doctrine set forth by Paul, the Christian’s salvation is by grace free of legalism and “works.” By the same token, Paul sets forth the qualifications required for men seeking the offices of the ministry (1 Timothy 3). Under these qualifications, the elders and deacons must be blameless, not for their salvation, but rather for the effect their lives and examples will have on others. While I am a pharmacist by profession, I am also a licensed local preacher in the Methodist Church, and I learned the hard way that you can’t witness for Christ with a cigarette or a glass of beer in your hand if you want to be effective.… The truth of the matter is that in the eyes of the unsaved they place a sinful emphasis on these things, and while they do these things themselves they don’t believe they should be done by anyone connected with the preaching of the Word.…

It never fails, or at least it never seems to fail, that the more modern, the more liberal, the further the minister gets from the fundamental Word, the less effective his message becomes.

Yes, we have complete freedom in Christ, but with the freedom we have an increased responsibility to get the Word to others. It … isn’t a question of self-indulgence or gratification of the flesh or harmful effects on the body, but more importantly, does it interfere with the leading of souls to Christ.…

WILLIAM C. FRUEHAN

Scranton, Pa.

I feel that ministers should do some soul-searching on this matter. My Lutheran friends brush off my query with, “It’s a medical matter!” When it becomes a matter of stewardship, and common courtesy of annoyance, then it has gone beyond the stage of medicine.…

J. RUSSELL MEAD

Evangelical United Brethren Church

Winslow, Neb.

Crete, Jerusalem, Athens

The discovery that the Eteocretan inscriptions in the island of Crete (News, May 11 issue) are in a Semitic dialect, although written in ancient Greek letters, shows the ancient connection between all ancient alphabets of the Mediterranean and the Hebrew alphabet. The very sounds of the names given the letters also indicate this. All we have to do is compare the Greek and Hebrew names: A—Alpha-Aleph; B—Beta-Beth; G—Gamma-Gimel; [etc.] …

The connection between the use of the pointings and the loss of the silenced Waw and Yodh letters is also an indication that the Waw and Yodh were not originally silent, but were silenced after the points replaced them. What were they before being silenced?

A comparison with the Greek alphabet might give a clue: Yodh comes before Kaph; Iota comes before Kappa. This indicates that Yodh corresponds to Iota or I. Unfortunately, Waw has no mate in the Greek alphabet, so it gives us no clue by position. But the fact that the Yodh may be the Hebrew Iota or I, nudges us to look at Aleph and Alpha, both firsts. Can Aleph be the Hebrew Alpha or A? If so, then He is the Greek Epsilon or E. That would give us I, A, E, of the vowels. In the Greek alphabet Omicron or O comes before Pi or P; while in Hebrew the letter before Pe is Ayin (another silenced letter). Can Ayin correspond to Omicron? If so, then we have mates to Alpha, Epsilon, Iota, and Omicron. Only Upsilon is missing. And only the letter corresponding to Waw is missing. Can Waw be it? If so, we have all the vowel letters in the Hebrew alphabet!

Long before the use of pointings in writing Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek—the Greek Septuagint. Hebrew proper names had to be written with Greek letters. If we study how they replaced the Hebrew letters, we can get a clue about Hebrew vowels. We find that all these Hebrew letters, Aleph, He, Waw, Yodh, and Ayin, are replaced by Greek vowels.

The pointings came into use to protect the sounding of the Hebrew, and to keep it to the norm sounds of the times in which those pointings originated.…

So we can expect that, by the time the Septuagint transliterated the Hebrew proper names, different sounds had come to be used with the vowel letters. And this is just what we find. They are represented by different Greek vowel letters in different places. But, despite this shift, it is always a Greek vowel letter that represents the Hebrew Aleph, He, Yodh, Ayin, and Waw—never a Greek consonant letter. So there can be little doubt that they are the ancient Hebrew vowel letters, that were silenced by the use of the pointings, because the sounds given to them were different in different places and they had lost their utility for public readings.…

In 194 times out of 208 occurrences, the Septuagint renders Yodh as Iota, I.

Some of the ancient Hebrew consonant letters have also changed sounds during the sojourn of the Jews in Europe. Heth is Kh, but at the beginning of words seems to be like the vowel Aleph.

The use of the ancient vowel letters in their Roman counterparts will stop the deceptive misspelling that the pointings brought about, and reveal new light. Thus the alleged difference between the Hebrew words in Isaiah 14:12 (Helel) as compared to Zechariah 11:2 and Ezekiel 21:12 (17) (Yalal) is exposed as a myth, when we use the English letters corresponding to those in the older plene mss. All three occurrences will be written Eilil, the hiphil imperative, howl, wail, lament. Of course, this will upset many a poem, story, and sermon.…

J. F. HARTMAN

Springfield, Ill.

On Excommunication

The impact of Edward John Carnell’s article, “The Government of the Church” (June 22 issue) … was vague when he spoke of how the early church dealt with false teaching: “The apostles denounced the error, but they did not excommunicate the Judaizers.” This would seem to hint at a policy of tacit coexistence.

The word “excommunicate” is too weak to describe the apostolic reaction to the Judaizers. The formula went beyond “Let him be excommunicated” to “Let him be anathema”! False brethren, creeping in unawares, were an ever present peril in the minds of the apostles. And the arsenal of Christian defense included the power to deliver such to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme. Our Lord would require of his church certain procedures to be followed in the case of trespass (and would not false teaching be a trespass?). The end procedure is excommunication: “… let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican” (Matt. 18:17). Even then, the church is not empowered to declare the person unsaved. It simply says that it is no longer possible to regard this person as a Christian, or his teaching as Christian.…

EDWARDS E. ELLIOTT

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church

Garden Grove, Calif.

A. Cressy Morrison

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The reign of law—Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing No. 1 is 1 to 10. Your chance of drawing 1 and 2 in succession would be 1 in 100. Your chance of drawing 1, 2, and 3 in succession would be one in a thousand. Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3, and 4 in succession would be one in 10,000 and so on, until your chance of drawing from No. 1 to No. 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion.

The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

So many essential conditions are necessary for life to exist on our earth that it is mathematically impossible that all of them could exist in proper relationship by chance on any one earth at one time. Therefore, there must be in nature some form of intelligent direction. If this be true, then there must be a purpose.…

Some astronomers tell us that the chance of two stars passing sufficiently near to each other to develop a pulsating and destructive tide is in the order of millions and that a collision would be so rare that it is beyond calculation. Nevertheless, one of the astronomical theories is that at some time, let us say two billion years ago, a star did pass near enough to our sun to raise terrific tides and throw out into space those objects we know as planets, which appear vast to us but are insignificant astronomically. Among those masses drawn out was that wisp of cosmos which became what we call the earth. It is a body of no importance astronomically, yet it may be demonstrated that it is the most important body so far known to us.

We must presume that the earth is composed of some of the elements which are to be found in the sun and none other. These elements are apportioned on earth in certain percentages, which, so far as the surface is concerned, have been fairly well ascertained. The bulk of the earth is now reduced to very permanent dimensions and its mass has been determined. Its speed in its orbit around the sun is extremely constant. Its rotation on its axis is determined so accurately that a variation of a second in a century would upset astronomical calculations. It is accompanied by a satellite known as the moon, whose motions are determined and whose sequence of variations repeat themselves every 18 1/3 years. Had the bulk of the earth been greater or less, or had its speed been different, it would have been farther from or nearer to the sun, and this different condition would have profoundly affected life of all kinds, including man. So profoundly indeed, that had this earth varied in either respect to any marked degree, life as we know it could not have existed. Of all the planets, the earth is, so far as we now know, the only one whose relation to the sun makes our sort of life possible.

Mercury, because of astronomical laws, turns only one side to the sun, rotating on its axis only once in its complete revolution of the sun—Mercury’s year. In consequence, one side of Mercury must be a desert furnace and the other frigid. Its mass and gravity are so small that all traces of an atmosphere seem to have escaped. If any atmosphere does remain, it is tearing in unbelievable tornadoes from one side of the planet to the other. Venus is a mystery, with dense vapor for atmosphere, and its id demonstrated to be absolutely uninhabitable by any known living thing. Mars is the one exception and may bear life like ours, either in its beginnings or on the point of extinction. But life on Mars must be dependent upon other gases than oxygen, and especially hydrogen; as they seem to have escaped. There can be no water on Mars. Its temperature averages too low for vegetation as we know it. The moon could not hold an atmosphere and is now absolutely uninhabitable. During its night it is extremely cold, and during its long day it is a very hot cinder. The other planets are too far from the sun for life to be established, and because of other insuperable difficulties cannot support life in any form. It is now generally agreed that there has never been, and can never be, life in any known form on any planet except our earth. Therefore, we have in the very beginning as a home for human beings a little planet which, after a series of vicissitudes during two or more billion years, has become a suitable place for the existence of plant and animal life, of which we find the crowning achievement to be man.

The earth rotates on its axis in 24 hours or at the rate of about 1,000 miles an hour. Suppose it turned at the rate of 100 miles an hour. Why not? Our days and nights would then be ten times as long as now. The hot sun of summer would then burn up our vegetation each long day and every sprout would freeze in such a night. The sun, the source of all life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms up just enough and not too much. It is marvelously stable, and during millions of years has varied so little that life as we know it has survived. If the temperature on earth had changed so much as 50 degrees on the average for a single year, all vegetation would be dead and man with it, roasted or frozen. The earth travels around the sun at the rate of 18 miles each second. If the rate of revolution had been, say, six miles or forty miles each second, we would be too far from or too close to the sun for our form of life to exist.

Stars vary in size, as we all know. One is so large that if it were our sun, the orbit of the earth would be millions of miles inside its surface. Stars vary in the type of radiation. Many of their rays would he deadly to every known form of life. The intensity and volume of this radiation is anywhere from less than that of our sun to 10,000 times as great. If our sun gave off only one-half of its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would have been reduced to dust long ago if we had ever been born as a protoplasmic spark of life. So our sun is about right for our life among millions of others which are not.

The earth is tilted at an angle of 23 degrees. This gives us our seasons. If it had not been tilted, the poles would be in eternal twilight. The water vapor from the ocean would move north and south, piling up continents of ice and leaving possibly a desert between the equator and the ice. Glacial rivers would erode and roar through canyons into the salt-covered bed of the ocean to form temporary pools of brine. The weight of the unbelievably vast mass of ice would depress the poles, causing our equator to bulge or erupt or at least show the need of a new waistline belt. The lowering of the ocean would expose vast new land areas and diminish the rainfall in all parts of the world, with fearful results.

We seldom realize that all life is confined to the space between the snow of the mountain tops and the heat of the earth’s interior. This narrow stratum as compared with the diameter of the earth is but one half the thickness of one leaf of a thousand-page book. The history of all creatures is written on this tissue-thin surface. If all the air was liquefied it would cover the earth to a depth of 35 feet or 1 part in 600,000 of the distance to the earth’s center, a close adjustment!

The moon is 240,000 miles away, and the tides twice a day are usually a gentle reminder of its presence. Tides of the ocean run as high as 60 feet in some places, and even the crust of the earth is twice a day bent outward several inches by the moon’s attraction. All seems so regular that we do not grasp to any degree the vast power that lifts the whole area of the ocean several feet and bends the crust of the earth, seemingly so solid. Mars had a moon—a little one-only 6,000 miles away from it. If our moon was, say 50,000 miles away instead of its present respectable distance, our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all the lowland of all the continents would be submerged by a rush of water so enormous that even the mountains would soon be eroded away, and probably no continent could have risen from the depths fast enough to exist today. The earth would crack with the turmoil and the tides in the air would create daily hurricanes.

If the continents were washed away, the average depth of water over the whole earth would be about a mile and a half and life could not exist except perhaps in the abysmal depth of the ocean, where it would feed upon itself till extinct. Science seems to sustain the theory that this condition did exist during the general chaos before the earth solidified. By well recognized laws, the very tides pushed the moon farther and farther away and at the same time slowed the rotation of the earth from less than a six-hour day to one of twenty-four. So the gentle moon has now become the lover’s delight and is in splendid adjustment, which promises to remain safe for a billion years or so. The same astronomers also believe that far in the future, by the same astronomical laws, the moon will return to the earth, burst when close enough and glorify our dead world with rings like those of Saturn.

Out of a chaotic mixture of the elements torn from the sun at 12,000 degrees temperature, and thrown at every conceivable velocity into limitless space, has come our solar system. To chaos has come order so exact that the place any part will occupy at any time can be predicted to the second. The balance is so perfect that it has not varied in a billion years and points to eternity. All this through the reign of law. By this same law the established order as we see it in the solar system is repeated elsewhere.—A. CRESSY MORRISON,Man Does Not Stand Alone, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1944 (Rev. ed., 1947), Chapter 1, “Our Unique World,” pp. 13–19.

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Albert Hyma

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During the past 50 years a large number of historians, educators and church leaders have come to the conclusion that it is possible to accept both Darwinian evolution and orthodox Christianity. Increasingly, millions of pupils in our high schools and colleges (even elementary schools) are offered unauthenticated, fantastic statements in textbooks dealing with the history of civilization. Their instructors appear convinced that the undermining of respect for the Christian faith in the public schools is in accordance with the “blessings of liberty” mentioned in the national Constitution. But when a Christian point of view is presented, a terrible roar of protest arises. Atheists and infidels allege that the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits even the support of the famous statement in our Declaration of Independence to the effect that all men have been created free and equal. They would also abolish the maxim of the grand old men who founded our Republic: “In God we trust.”

Fusing Fact And Fiction

One problem arises when scientific theories are so interwoven with facts that the student accepts both as truth.

An example of this destructive approach, tantamount to an attack upon the orthodox Christian faith, is found in a textbook by Professor O. Harold King of Miami University entitled A History of Civilization: The Story of Our Heritage. Thousands of boys and girls from fine Christian homes have read: “Their (the scientists’) theory of the development … begins with the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and men—the first primate whose nearest equivalent today is Tarsius.” This remarkable animal “still lives.” Farther on more fiction is presented as absolute truth: “Then occurred an interlude in which man’s ancestor displayed himself a progressive. He got down out of the trees. But so did a few of the apes, like the gorilla” (p. 10).

Too often in classroom discussion, if Adam and Eve appear at all, they appear as the butt of a joke. So anti-Christian viewpoints infiltrate education, subvert the student mind, and thus rob the church of its leaders for tomorrow.

Is it not a matter of academic ignorance, moreover, when Professor King asserts that “the Old Testament shows the influence of Babylonian legends”? Or when he declares that the God of the Hebrews “had passed through a long evolution as those who worshipped him received new inspirations. When the Hebrews first came out of the desert, Yahweh was a primitive god, showing his power in storms”? Poor Abraham must have been very credulous and naїve to have argued with such a God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah! And what explanation remains for the second verse in the Bible where we are informed that “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”? We are also told that God created man “in his own image.” That God was called Elohim, and his powers were far beyond those of a mere tribal god. And what evidence does Professor King show for his unfortunate conclusion: “While this was not monotheism as yet, nor even a close approximation, as in contemporary Egypt, the scope of Yahweh’s powers opened the way to preferential recognition of him” (p. 69)? This is a very different story from that which students had previously learned in their Sunday schools. Can they retain faith in their pastors when they are indoctrinated in such reading in universities and colleges?

A subtle example of indoctrination is found in a textbook by the Columbia professor, Theodosius Dobzhansky. In the frontispiece of the textbook, Evolution, Genetics and Man (John Wiley and Sons, 1955) appears a familiar print, bearing the caption, “Creation of Adam, a fresco by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. This is a symbolic representation of Creation by evolution” (italics mine). Is this not distortion of truth for indoctrination?

Still more ominous is the example of work by distinguished scholars at the University of St. Louis. In 1959 they published a book which was issued by the Bruce Publishing Company, hence supported to some extent by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Here some implications in attempting to fuse two viewpoints are clearly seen: others are not. The authors proclaim that the account in Genesis is not reliable. They dare not offend the great scientists who thunder forth their anathemas against the humble Christian’s belief in the fall of man or the operation of Satan among men. They imply that God did not say to Satan: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Modern science is supposed to have proved that the very first human beings were very different from the two named in the Bible.

Now let us examine the exact phraseology used by the three historians at the University of St. Louis (Thomas P. Neill, Daniel D. McGarry, and Clarence L. Hohl). In A History of Western Civilization they reiterate: “According to modern scientists, man is not descended from the apes as we know them, but man and present-day apes derive from a common previous ancestor, now extinct” (Vol. I, p. 12). Then they offer the amazing opinion that this theory of evolution implies nothing “for our beliefs in God, creation, a human spiritual soul, immortality, and moral responsibility as formulated by theistic philosophy, revealed religion and the Bible.” No matter how the human body originated, “the dependence of man and nature upon God is unassailed.” And as for the development of religious concepts, we meet again the idea that man advanced from barbarism to civilization. We are informed that “in this process, man seemed to pass from a vague monotheism through polytheism and back again to monotheism” (p. 21). The textbook in question does not bear the official approval of any archbishop in the Roman Catholic Church; had such been granted, the archbishop would have repudiated the faith of his own communion.

So, a compromise has been attempted between two bitter enemies—Darwinian evolution and orthodox Christianity.

The Biblical View

The Bible does not teach that man descended from animals and rose from barbarism to civilization; on the contrary, it teaches that Adam and Eve were created in God’s image and endowed with immense spiritual talents. These were largely ruined, as both Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola taught, by disobedience to the commandment of God not to eat of the fruit produced by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As soon as our young people have been convinced through their textbooks dealing with the history of civilization that there never was such a thing as original sin, they must conclude that the human race does not need a Saviour and that the sacraments of baptism and communion are superfluous, for there is no such thing as present sin. If true, the Mass then loses its value for the Roman Catholic Church. The whole hierarchy of that communion would, in time, find itself without clientele. And Protestants would have to abolish the Sunday school.

‘It Doth Not Yet Appear’

Not yet on winter’s

Brittle branches bare

Can we perceive

What will be clothed

In vibrant green.

Not yet in single kerneled corn

Can we behold the tasseled ear,

Not in the dearest human form

See with the certainty of sight

The immortality

That we shall one day wear.

Yet we may glory in the glance

All darkly seen

Of naked branches

Dressed in spring’s new green;

Of one bare grain

Miraculously multiplied;

Of human dust in death

Whose spectral seeming end

By spirit is denied.

RUTHE T. SPINNANGER

Difficulties With Evolution

In the acceptance of evolutionary theory honest differences of findings are too seldom discussed. Paleontological evidence is the basis for evolution: yet there are limits to paleontological evidence, as some scientists state, and unresolved problems in relation to it. Why is this not more frequently mentioned?

Suppose human beings do owe their existence to animals who produced them. How did that sort of production cease? How prevent a reversal from human to animal life? Does any leading scientist today imagine that—with or without a god—the process of evolution would come to a halt? Then why do dogs reproduce dogs and why do monkeys also remain true to their own kind? No anthropologist has ever demonstrated from any findings that the origin of species as envisioned by Charles Darwin was “nothing but the truth.” It actually is still pure fiction. Why are its implications taught as truth?

In Genesis 1:25 we are told that “God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” Each group reproduced after its kind: one group did not produce another kind. Moreover, man and animals were sharply differentiated, for in the next verse we read: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,” and so forth. In the Hebrew original the word for God is Elohim, which at first had a double meaning. For this reason we have the plural pronoun and verb: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Here again we have the significant phrases: “after our likeness” and “after their kind.” Man was made after the likeness of God.

As long as secular historians who do not believe in the Bible ignore its teachings, it is possible to argue that they present a view contrary to that of orthodox Christians. But when professors state that their view is the same as that expressed in the Bible while they are denying the veracity of the Book of Genesis, they are causing immense confusion. Worse than that, they are misleading their own students. Instead of combining two points of view that are diametrically opposed, they assist secular scholars by making it appear as if the Bible actually supports Darwinian evolution.

Biblical teachings involved go far beyond the Genesis account. The Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:45: “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” He assumed that human beings (with no mention of animals) could participate in the resurrection. The natural body of man is “sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.” In verse 39 he remarked that “there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts.” He had in mind the enormous difference between animals and human beings. He would have gasped with astonishment to hear that monkeys were closely related to human beings. (To call some of them apes would have made little difference!) No animals were assured a resurrection, no animals were made in the image of God.

Vanishing Fear Of Sin

A major unfortunate result of teaching evolutionary theory as truth has been the loss of fear for commission of sins. Men will argue that the word “sins” is now out of date. Errors are conceded, to be sure, but it is no longer fashionable to speak of sin and sinners. As human beings rise to ever greater heights of wisdom, they care less and less about the “inevitable punishment” that follows crime. They now can make their own laws and feel that somehow they can escape the results of evil actions and thoughts. Both heaven and hell fade away from the scene of scientific research. The things unseen by human eyes lose their significance. Conscience has importance only as a rudimentary survival (its presence at all being unexplained mystery) and moral law is based solely upon mores. Thus all values become relative and transitory. In short, Darwinian evolution and Christianity are enemies, not friends.

Illuminating, as a contrast, is a statement made in the Third Number of the Baltimore Catechism, published in 1933. In explanation of Question 63 the author presents the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church: “The creation of Eve, the wife of Adam, shows that the whole human race descends from one man.… Evolution is the theory that man developed from lower forms of animals. There is no scientific proof for evolution, though it claims to be scientific.” We are also informed here that if evolution were true, “it ought to be able to repeat itself.” Inferior skulls might well be “cases of degeneracy and prove nothing.”

How well Professor Martin Luther in his lectures on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, delivered in the academic year 1515–1516, understood the facts of life. He stated: “What is original sin? It is the loss of all rectitude and all efficiency in all our faculties, both of the body and the soul.” Luther referred to a famous book by Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, entitled Spiritual Ascensions, in which he found original sin described in a manner unsurpassed outside of the Bible. Zerbolt had drawn the following conclusion: “We have been contaminated by original sin, and wounded in all the powers and faculties of the soul.… Christ through his precious death does indeed redeem us from our original sin.” All the great creeds of Christendom have supported these views. Unfortunately, the sermons preached on Sunday are disregarded by students who have been indoctrinated by their textbooks to opposing pronouncements. If they think that there is no need of a choice, they simply do not understand the present contest between Christ and Satan.

If it is a violation of the First Amendment to teach the biblical story of creation in our schools, it is also a violation of religious freedom to teach a conflicting theory of origins as truth.

- More fromAlbert Hyma

Walter E. Lammerts

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As we gaze enraptured into a marine pool—seeing here a sea anemone, its iridescent blue-green tentacles rhythmically searching for food, and there the ludicrous side-winding hermit crab, his home a borrowed sea snail shell—we suddenly sense that natural selection explains too much! The brown rockweed; green, red, and coralline algae; sun, blood and purple starfish; sea urchins; sand dollars; many richly beautiful red beard sponges—surely the sea tides, daily giving this pool in the craggy rock its place in the sun for an hour or so, could not, by selection, develop such marvelous diversity as this.

Elliott G. Watson, British zoologist writing for The Saturday Evening Post (“Hidden Heart of Nature,” May 27, 1961, pp. 32–33), lists four examples of life histories that orthodox evolution theories simply cannot explain. We mention only the coral reef inhabiting crab whose claws are so small as to be useless as weap-one. But the backward curving teeth of the claws grasp the slippery bodies of small anemones and detach them carefully and without injury from the rocks. Thus held close to the mouth of the pirate crab, the anemones continue to spread their tentacles and to capture small creatures, which the crab, with his free front pair of walking legs, removes as dainty tidbits. Those he dislikes he leaves for the anemones, which are finally released unharmed. Are these adaptations to be explained by chance mutations? Did a chance modification of the claws prompt some ancestral crab to detach an anemone for the mere fun of the thing and by chance hold it near its mouth? If so, we must then assume that the crab passed on to its offspring this behavior tendency, and through natural selection the crab species thus developed their close association with various anemones—the species differing, of course, (to make the problem more complex) for each specie of pirate crab. Such process, Watson says, reason simply cannot accept, and I agree with him.

Experimenting With Mutations

Let us briefly consider these mutations. It is currently believed that they are caused mostly by cosmic radiation (B. Peters, “Progress in Cosmic Ray Research Since 1947,” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 64, Feb. 1959, p. 156), whereupon natural selection, according to Neo-Darwinian theory, leads to new species. My own work on neutron-induced variations in roses describes a technique by which from 50 radiated buds of Queen Elizabeth we can induce more mutations than could hitherto be found by a lifetime of searching among several million rose plants grown annually from non-radiated buds (“Neutron-Induced Variation of Roses,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, Vol. 13, No. 1:2–6, 1960). Without exception, all mutations so induced were found to be defective or weaker than Queen Elizabeth. Some, such as a three-foot dwarf type, were horticulturally desirable novelties since gardeners sometimes find the seven to eight foot height of the Queen Elizabeth objectionable. Biologically, however, there is no competition with the Queen Elizabeth.

After reviewing the thousands of “naturally” occurring mutations found in that biological Cinderella, the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), T. Dobzhansky admits that only a few have greater capability of living or viability than normal, and these only at temperatures higher than normal for the species! Yet from such questionably favorable cases he still argues for evolution (Genetics and the Origin of Species, Columbia University Press, 1951, chap. on mutations).

R. B. Goldschmidt devotes a whole book to showing how contrary to fact such a concept really is (The Material Basis of Evolution, Pageant Press, 1960). Still he seems to accept evolution as proven by geology, embryology, and taxonomy, and argues for some rather mysterious large-scale “macro-evolution” during embryonic development, new genera, and even new families suddenly arising as a result of segmental alteration of the chromosomes. Incidentally, nothing of this sort has ever been observed, even on a species level.

As K. Patau has shown, even mutations having a 1 per cent survival advantage increase in frequency from .01 to .1 per cent of the population only after 900,230 generations (“Die Mathematische Analyse der Evolutions Vorgange,” Zeitschrift für Inductive Abstamungs und Vererbungslehre, Vol. 76:220–228). Another 100,511 generations are needed to increase the frequency to 100 per cent. Certainly the time needed for natural selection to effect a change in a large population is enormous even geologically speaking. That is why Sir Charles Lyell’s concept of slow change by presently acting causes is so necessary for any concept of general evolution. We have all been taught the sequence of raindrops, rivulets, brooks, streams, and finally rivers that, carrying the sediments to continental shelves, in time wear away the mountains to almost level plains. Undoubtedly some of our landscape does result from this infinitesimally slow action. Among the well-rounded hills of England, near Downs, the home of Darwin, one can almost see such a process in operation as he watches the well-ordered flow of streams into the slow-moving Thames. But can the sedimentary rocks of the world and their abundance of fossils really be explained in this way? Let us remember that any demonstration of substantial world-wide catastrophe breaks the slow time sequence so necessary for evolution. Daily we live under threat of sudden destruction by nuclear energy bombs. Could this fact perhaps be influencing scientists to reconsider catastrophism as the possible explanation of our planet’s scarred features?

Ivan T. Sanderson writes a fascinating story of the “Riddle of the Frozen Giants” (The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 16, 1960, p. 83). “Here is a really shocking (for our previous, Uniformitarian, way of thinking) picture,” he says. “Vast herds of enormous well-fed mammoths not specifically designed for extreme cold, placidly feeding in sunny pasture delicately plucking flowering buttercups at a temperature in which we would probably not even have needed a coat. Suddenly they were all killed without any visible sign of violence and before they could so much as swallow a last mouthful of food, and then were quick frozen so rapidly that every cell of their bodies is perfectly preserved despite their great bulk and high temperature.”

What, we may well ask, could possibly do this? Sanderson’s explanation is that at least 20 or more volcanoes erupted simultaneously due to long cracks suddenly forming from built-up tension in the outer mantle. Coincident with these eruptions occurred great lava flows. The sudden extrusion of dust and gases formed monstrous amounts of rain and snow and cut out sunlight for days, weeks, and even months in some areas. Cold fronts of great length were built up that caused continental floods of vast proportions and tidal waves. The gases shot high into outer space, cooled to—150 degrees Fahrenheit, and suddenly descending, instantly froze the mammoths. Sanderson’s postulation of the rains, tidal wave action, and continental floods makes the usual interpretation of the Genesis flood seem a tame affair by comparison.

But one might say this burial of mammoths is most unusual; surely most fossils were deposited by burial in sediments accumulated slowly as are present-day alluvial fans and offshore continental shelves. While it may come as a shock to followers of the usual geological discussions, actually the opposite is true—almost all of the fossils, by their very manner of perfect preservation, clearly show a sudden burial. M. Brangersma Sanders (“Mass Mortality in the Sea, Marine Ecology, and Paleoecology,” chap. 29, Geological Society of America Memoir 67, 1957, pp. 972, 973), William J. Miller (An Introduction to Historical Geology, 6th ed., Van Nostrand, 1952, p. 12), and Ph. H. Kuenen (Notes from Marine Biology, Wiley, pp. 215, 217) all agree that very few fossils are now formed, and these only under catastrophic conditions.

Simple And Complex Forms

Just what geologic finds then do so many scientists consider as evidence for evolution? Stripped of technical words, the answer is this: Simple marine types of plants and animals are usually found at the bottom of the sedimentary or water-deposited rock formations and lying on the granitic rocks of the earth’s outer mantle. The more complex backboned land animals and flowering plants are toward the top. Furthermore, except in areas such as the great swath of muck stretching around the Arctic Ocean, the formations have a characteristic orderly assemblage of plants and animals instead of being jumbled in some hopeless mess. The actual percentage of area showing this progressive order from the simple to the complex is surprisingly small. Indeed, formations with very complex forms of life are often found resting directly on the basic granites. Furthermore, I have in my own files a list of over 500 cases that attest to a reverse order, that is, simple forms of life resting on top of more advanced types.

It is assumed that in the sedimentary rock layers graded 1, 2, 3, and 4 in complexity, breaking (faulting) occurred followed by the uplift and thrusting of those on one side over those which remained in place; the resulting order of rock layers then became 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 (2, 3, 4). Later erosion presumably removed all traces of 2, 3, and 4!

The gloriously beautiful Glacier National Park is one such case. Ever since my first visit there in 1936, this majestic area of vari-colored limestone mountains and clear, deep lakes in the valleys of grey-black shale, has fascinated me. These mountains containing only simple kinds of fossilized algal clusters were supposedly thrust over the shales which are classified as Cretaceous because they contain more advanced fossil types such as flowering trees, ammonites, and fishes. In 1957, Ray Siers of Chief Mountain Ranch, Dr. J. Hines, and I drove about 30 miles east of Many Glacier Hotel to the base of Chief Mountain and located the contact line of the upper limestone mountain formation lying on the Cretaceous shale. Dr. Hines and Siers climbed to the top finding only limestone. What had become of 2, 3, and 4 (the Cretaceous shale)?

As I wrote Professor Henry M. Morris: “After careful observation, I am convinced George McCready Price is even more right than he thought: at the actual contact lines, very thin layers of shale showing no evidence of grinding or sliding action were always present. Furthermore, these were cemented to the upper Altyn limestone (cf. George McCready Price, The New Geology, Pacific Press, 1923).

Careful field study during many vacations since 1936 has convinced me that the assumed thrust faults are purely imaginary. The transition layers above the contact line clearly indicate deposition of the limestone formations on the underlying distorted shales. Many well-meaning pastors and teachers have pictured the Genesis flood as a rather mild local affair limited in its destruction to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. As John C. Whitcomb says, careful study of Genesis 6–9 indicates it was world-wide and violent in action (Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian Publishing, 1961, chap. 1). A number of geologists such as Clifford L. Burdick (Streamlining Stratigraphy, The Forum, published by the Society for the Study of Natural Sciences, Glendale Academy Press, 1948, Vol. II, pp. 121–130) and Richard M. Ritland (Ph.D. of Harvard, now working with Dr. Frank Marsh at Berrien Springs, Mich.) agree with Morris that most of the sedimentary rocks and many of the great lava flows as well as the submerged mountain regions now being explored under the ocean are the result of this great catastrophe. The after-effects lasted for thousands of years, and resulted in more lava flows; in repeated burial of forests such as in the Amethyst area of Yellowstone National Park; in worldwide glaciation; in interior lakes such as Lahonton, and in vast alluvial fans almost covering mountain peaks in the great southwest desert of the United States.

Other arguments for evolution include the idea that the embryo, as it grows into an adult, retraces the various evolutionary stages. As stated by Haeckel, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” But Cyril B. Courvelle, neural surgeon of White Memorial Hospital, Los Angeles, shows that the embryos of even closely allied species use cells and tissues from various and different sources (“The Recapitulation Theory and Casual Significance of Parallelism,” Bulletin of Deluge Geology, Vol. 1, No. 2 and Vol. 2, No. 1, Collegiate Press, Arlington, California). This fact destroys any hope of tracing presumed evolutionary ancestry since the organizers cut directly across the lines of theoretical family trees. There are, for example, alternating arches and furrows on the neck of the human embryo which are claimed to resemble gill slits of a fish. But this relationship is questionable since the first of the four arches develops into the lower jaw in man, but not in the fish. The second arch forms man’s middle and outer ear which the fish does not even have. Actually, gills are never formed. While Bradley Patten accepts recapitulation in his standard textbook of embryology for medical students, he admits this, and observes, “Although the tissue closing the gill clefts reduces to a thin membrane consisting of a layer of internal (entoderm) and external (extoderm) tissue with no intervening mesoderm, this membrane rarely disappears altogether” (Human Embryology, Blakiston, 1953, p. 460).

In its development the embryo follows the principle of least action; it proceeds as directly as possible and with no waste of material to the construction of the various organs. It is interesting that Patten credits Wilhelm His with laying the foundations of modern embryology and in his discussion of the historic development of this branch of science does not even mention Haeckel. Wilhelm His clearly perceived that similarity in form did not signify ancestry, a conclusion strengthened by modern experimental embryology.

Much has been made of the so-called tail in the human embryo. The late Douglas Dewar, British ornithologist, concluded that the proto-vertebra behind the region of the leg buds fuse to become the os coccyx or tail bone. This is soon bent forward and serves for the attachment of muscles; it is therefore not an ancestral relic but a designed structure (More Difficulties of the Evolution Theory, Thynne, 1938, pp. 34, 35). The fact that the tail is thus curved enables man to sit without discomfort—a rather important consideration in recent American living!

In Support Of Creationism

Patten discusses the primitive streak as a growth center which pushes cells into the growing body, but which never becomes larger itself. The head end of the embryo is always precocious in differentiation, something one would hardly expect if the embryo recapitulated its presumed ancestors who had brains consisting only of paired nerve ganglia! Quite obviously the regulatory mechanism of the embryo is working toward a predetermined goal or template and so the head is developed first to give time for the intricate brain development. Actually, embryo development favors the special creation theory.

Oddly enough, not the faintest trace of recapitulation is found in plants. The rose is rather highly placed in the plant kingdom. Yet its embryonic development shows no trace of the presumed evolution from algae through liverworts, mosses, and ferns to flowering plants.

From the creational viewpoint, by classifying plants and animals into species, genera, and families, we attempt to understand which ones belong together by virtue of having the most genes in common. On the basis of economy of effort, a wise Creator would certainly use the same genes from a common stockpile, so to speak, whenever the same form or function was to be achieved. Thus we have the same gene pattern of flower color inheritance in such widely separated species as the carnation (family Caryophyllaceae) and the rose (family Rosaceae) (W. E. Lammerts, “Inheritance of Magenta Color in Roses,” American Rose Annual, 1960, pp. 119–125). The grouping of such genera as the apple, pear, strawberry, and peach into the rose family merely means that more genes are possessed in common by species in these genera, than are shared for example by a species in the genus Rosa and one in the genus Geranium. One cannot infer descent from a common ancestor any more logically than one can assume the evolution of a complex tinker toy from a simple one. All forms simply came from the same large set of tinker toy units.

Boundaries Of Variability

Quite obviously, to associate the ability of species and varieties to change as they spread over the surface of the earth with evolution is to push this feature of variability out of all proportion. The inability of older naturalists like Darwin to evaluate this variability potential of special and varieties properly and thus their mistaking it for evolution or change of one species into another are quite understandable. After all, they had no clear concept of genetics and even set up genetic postulates such as pangenesis, which is at complete variance with what we now know to take place. Indeed, the continued interest and belief of many modern biologists in evolution, at least in some modified form, is puzzling, since the facts of genetic variability, cytology, and mutation so unmistakably show that species and varieties have such clearly defined boundries of variability. In his Studies in Creationism (Review and Herald Publishing Company, 1950) Frank L. Marsh discusses these boundaries from the viewpoint of creationism. He argues rather convincingly that while some types of species were created monotypic, that is, capable of very little variability (a classic example is the shellfish, Lingula), others, like the rose, were created polytypic, that is, having a high variability potential.

The idea of evolution has had a dulling effect on the minds and work of many younger and less imaginative plant and animal breeders; the very concept that changes require millions of years tends to make one feel that little can be accomplished in just one lifetime. Actually plant breeding experience shows that within the limits of variability possible for a given species, change can be effected quite rapidly. From the practical point of view, however, we must always recognize that once the all-wise Creator’s predetermined limits of variation have been reached, any attempts for further progress are a waste of time.

Many younger scientists tend to accept creationism and catastrophism. In my own small circle of personal contacts are at least 25 creationists. One of the older experienced pioneers, the eminent microbiologist Rene Dubos, has little good to say of evolution; he maintains it provides no answers to questions concerning the development of life (The Dreams of Reason, Science and Utopia, Columbia University Press, 1961). Heribert Nilsson, the late Director of the Botanical Institute of Lund, Sweden, is even more emphatic in his conclusions, as judged by his recently published Synthetische Artbildung (Verlag, OWH Gleerup, 1953). In this two-volume 1130-page book he reports on his 30 years of work. Then he asks: “Has there really been an evolution? Are proofs of its occurrence tenable? After a detailed comprehensive review of facts, we have been forced to give the answer, No!”

Since we are made in God’s image, perhaps we shall learn how he created the marvelous physical universe with its interesting plants and animals. As we are blessed with more knowledge, we may even be able to “make” that metropolis of activity called a “simple” cell. Should such wisdom and privilege ever be granted to man, it goes without saying that the steps involved will be so intricate as to make the wonders of a Swiss watch seem but the work of a child. And surely such “making” of life would not imply in the least that the intricately arranged neutrons, protons, neutrinos, electrons, and other physical units could ever have assembled themselves spontaneously.

We are now beginning to unravel the code and to learn just how the gene works through desoxyribosenucleic acid (D.N.A.) and with its partner ribosenucleic acid (R.N.A.). The conversion of inert chemicals into living units of activity as related in Genesis 1:11 (“Let the earth bring forth”) may not be impossible at all. It may well be achieved by precise knowledge of the chemical nature of these complex helically arranged molecules. Our increasing comprehension of God’s method in assembling these intricate patterns would hardly lead us to substantiate the naïve implication of evolution that they construct and arrange themselves. Instead this expanding discovery and knowledge should elicit from us an ever growing sense of awe and reverence for God’s infinite wisdom.

- More fromWalter E. Lammerts

Addison H. Leitch

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We are well past the halfway mark in what is to be two months in Europe and have already had almost a month on a conducted tour of the continent—the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy (10 days), and France, with brief stops in “nations” called Liechtenstein, Vatican City, and Monaco. Now we are centered in Cambridge from which point we are using a rental car for forays around the British Isles. One is tempted to reach very sage conclusions concerning life in these places, conclusions based on very superficial observations; a longer stay would make us more hesitant and could eventually give us greater wisdom and more understanding, maybe even some compassion. I am reminded of a cartoon which appeared one time in The Pittsburgh Press. In a crowd of Hopkinson-type club women the chairman was introducing the speaker: “Mrs. Bronson who has just finished a three-day auto trip to Washington will now review the political situation in the country.” If you will allow for our superficial observations to be superficial, we should like to make one or two.

On the right good ship “R.M.S. Queen Mary” there were announcements for Romish masses for three days before the announcement appeared for “Divine services” for all the others. A Roman priest conducted the masses with a proper altar and, I am sure, with some blessed and holy item there to make it all significantly Roman. Our “Divine” service was held in the lounge of First Class, and the ship’s captain read the service assisted by another officer who read the Scripture. Out of about 2,500 passengers and about an equal number of crew, there were a few more than 200 in attendance seated somewhat informally in the loungiest of first-class lounge chairs. The little organ was well played, but the singing was quite desultory and one may judge from the confusions in the service that we were not all Anglicans. The Scripture for the day was from its proper place in the year’s readings but cried out for some word on historical setting to say nothing of a little exegesis; the ratio of Scripture to Prayer Book was about one to ten, there was no sermon, all was wrapped up in 35 minutes, we all stood up while the captain and his retinue marched out. Then we all went our separate ways with nothing faintly resembling fellow-ship. As one firm-type nonconformist commented on the way out: “No wonder they don’t go to church in England.”

What disturbed me most on the ship was that in about five days, in the midst of drinking, horse-racing, a pool on the ship’s mileage, lots of twist, lots of eating and sleeping, the latest movies like “A Touch of Mink” in which Doris Day spends a couple of hours drunk and sober trying to decide on the pros and cons of adultery, the only public and external evidence of Protestant Christianity was that church service in the lounge. If the strength of Protestantism lies in Britain and America, what shall we say of its weakness? On the whole of our trip I have been increasingly uneasy about the apparent irrelevancy of Protestantism—not opposition, just complete unawareness in terms of commitment, language, ethics or culture, or even forms of amusem*nt; meanwhile formal services are held in which one could hardly guess from what is said or done, what Christianity is or what Christianity requires.

On succeeding Sundays on a tour made up of Canadians and Americans, mostly Protestants, the Romanists went to early mass each Sunday, and we had to make special arrangements to leave the tour, sometimes awkward arrangements. We had difficulty even finding a Protestant church. In Venice we attended church with only about 80 people, and yet I am sure the city was stuffed with tourists who would count themselves Protestant. Again the indifferent approach to the whole service appalled us—as Margaret Halsey once said, “They announce the news as if it hasn’t happened.” In Rome we attended church by “watching” a Roman mass. In Paris we were warmed and fed at the American church where the service and sermon lifted our hearts and where De Pauw University’s choir on tour gave us the gift of their music. If one may judge by the bulletin of the American church, the chief social outreach of the church is to alcoholics. By the general look of things France needs the wine industry for her basic economy; at the same time, however, the entrenched habit of drink appears injurious to her culture. Our Scotch and Soda Protestant friends drank well and often on the trip, but that is all another problem. Or should we discuss Sabbath observance by Protestants at home and abroad?

Preparations are going forward in St. Peter’s for Pope John’s coming ecumenical council, and Time magazine tells us that Protestant groups are scrambling to get representatives there. The bleacher seats in St. Peter’s nave look very hard, and they will be very crowded and awkward, and the WC’s of Italy, you know, are notably inadequate. Don’t go to that meeting unless you have to; there is something about St. Peter’s (except for the Sistine Chapel) which can be very disenchanting. The most noticeable characteristic of Romanism in Europe is the central place of the Mary images. In every church we visited the worshipers and the lighted candles were around the Mary worship centers, and there the prayers were being made; the adoration is for the mother not the Son. Axel Munthe in his San Michele tells of his experience of conversing with Catholic priests, “Seldom, very seldom, I heard the name of God mentioned, the name of his Son never. I once ventured to express my surprise to a … Frate who was a particular friend of mine over this omission of Christ in their discussions. The old Frate made no secret of his private opinion that Christ owed his reputation solely to His having the Madonna for His Mother.” What have we to do with Rome in that kind of non-sense. But “conversations” will now begin “looking toward union.”

- More fromAddison H. Leitch

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Growing Pains Or Death Sentence?

The World Role of Universities, by Edward W. Weidner (McGraw-Hill, 1962, 366 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Robert M. Davies, Chairman, Division of Humanities, Thiel College, Greenville, Pennsylvania.

Something like an ecumenical education movement is in its infancy, and this book discusses the growing pains. Professor Weidner discovers it to be a promising child if it can overcome several afflictions.

While there is no organized movement toward worldwide education (except UNESCO?), it is apparent that the universities of the world are engaged in a great cultural cross-pollenization. In 1960–61 over 50,000 foreign students from nearly 150 countries were enrolled in 1,600 American institutions of higher education and over 15,000 American students were attending foreign universities. At the same time 3,600 foreign faculty members were affiliated with 300 American universities, and 2,200 American faculty members were teaching abroad.

Of the six different types of programs now in effect, Professor Weidner asserts that three are designed mainly to import certain values into American education, and three export contributions abroad. Importers include the student-abroad programs, group research abroad, and the various small exchanges of a few students or professors between an American and a host-country university. Exporters, designed basically to bring about change in some foreign nation, consist of the various religious programs to further Christian education abroad, and two technical assistance programs. (In the latter, either foreign participants study in America or American professors work overseas.)

Professor Weidner believes that such educational exchange programs contribute to the universities’ pursuit of truth and to their dissemination of cultural advantages and insights. Most American educators would likely agree with this opinion, even though such programs pose special problems for that distinctively American institution: the small, church-related, or private, Christian college.

Unfortunately, according to Weidner, current exchange programs have not at all systematically achieved the benefits such programs might produce. Generally speaking, their relative failure in fulfilling early high expectations is caused by (1) wide variations in educational theory and practice throughout the world; (2) the inevitable imprecision of any new, experimental program; and (3) failure of both American and foreign universities to formulate clearly enough their educational purpose in these various programs.

Weidner’s strongest commendations are for the various student-abroad programs. These, he feels, should be encouraged and increased as rapidly as the student’s rather casual foreign experience can be assimilated into his American program, more carefully than is now generally the case.

The book’s treatment of religious exchanges, especially mission schools, is cursory (approximately 10 pages). Yet the major significance of this book for readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the fact that in a book which rarely expresses a categorical judgment Professor Weidner’s forecast for the future of religious and missionary education is clear and unrestricted:

“The day of the evangelical missionary abroad is drawing to a close. Most of the university programs with religious overtones have either changed in character or have gradually disappeared.… Basic national purposes must prevail, and where they conflict with the religious objectives of outside groups, the latter must give way.… Religious-oriented programs may continue to be of importance to a few host-country religious colleges, but they will not be of national importance either to the United States or to the host country (p. 119).

Spelled out, this means that in other lands the mission school centered in evangelical message and purpose is disappearing, as it is taken over by nationals of diverse purposes.

It is not within the scope of Professor Weidner’s book to note the ways in which the missionary movement has been adapting to this change through variations of the technical assistance programs abroad. In both Japan and India assistance programs which have brought foreign participants to American universities have been deemed more successful than assistance programs that have sent American professors abroad. Would it not be well for evangelical colleges and universities to intensify their efforts in bringing foreign students to their doors, and for individual Christians and churches to provide exchange scholarships to colleges that are Christian in fact as well as in nominal affiliation?

ROBERT M. DAVIES

A Sharp Tool

Teach or Perish!, by James DeForest Murch (Eerdmans, 1962, 117 pp., $3), is reviewed by Howard G. Hendricks, Chairman, Department of Christian Education, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.

Christian education is not optional but essential. The church that ceases to educate ceases to exist in terms of its New Testament objectives. This is the thesis of the book, pointedly expressed in its title, Teach or Perish!

After a shocking but objective analysis of the contemporary educational dilemma confronting the local church, author Murch spells out in inventory fashion the educational potentials available to the church for extricating herself from the suffocating fog of ignorance and apathy into which she unwittingly has been plunged.

It is refreshing to read a book that is not long on diagnosis and short on remedy. While the book does not pretend to proffer a cure-all, it does set forth a realistic “proposal for revitalization, expansion, and advance.”

This is not a textbook. “It is neither a treatise on the philosophy of Christian education nor a compilation of clever techniques for building successful Sunday schools” (p. vi). It is, however, a launching pad for an effective program for fostering educational enlightenment.

Pastors, directors, of Christian education, and others responsible for the educational program of the local church will welcome this volume as a sharp tool to place in the hands of laymen in order to motivate and enlist them in the exciting and gratifying process of “teaching others also.”

Chapter XI, entitled “A Growing Imperative,” is a well-written case championing the Christian day school movement. To many this will be worth the price of the book. This chapter is freighted with thought-provoking concepts which are consistently blurred in our pluralistic society.

In view of the paucity of literature that is educationally competent and evangelically perceptive, one hopes that Dr. Murch and others possessing his gifts will build upon this substantial foundation and contribute what is needed to implement these biblically transparent objectives. May their tribe increase!

HOWARD G. HENDRICKS

How Wide Is The Vision?

Undergraduate Education in Foreign Affairs, by Percy W. Bidwell (King’s Crown Press, 1962, 215 pp., $5), is reviewed by Walfred H. Peterson, Professor of Political Science, Bethel College, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

This review rests on two related assumptions: First, the Christian ought to be cosmopolitan. Ordered to go to all the world, belonging to the universal church, and obligated to be a social critic transcending his own culture, he dare not be a provincial partisan or narrow nationalist. True in all ages, the world scope of Christian concern is made more urgent by the accelerated developments of communications. Second, the Christian college ought to be a center of cosmopolitanism. Its programs ought to remedy the excessive self-concern and inordinate self-love inherent in society at large with a large dose of international and multi-cultural education; its graduates should excel in knowledge of the world beyond their nation’s borders.

The factual reality of the first assumption will not be raised here, though it merits study. The factual reality of the second will be raised, because recently a study throwing light on the matter has been completed by Percy W. Bidwell for the Carnegie Corporation.

The study, centered on American undergraduate education, asks whether the college graduate is reasonably informed on foreign affairs in light of his responsibilities of informed citizenship. Three quotations best serve to give the discouraging answer: “Higher education in the United States is more provincial than in any comparable country.” “Seniors emerge from our colleges with hardly any more acquaintance with foreign affairs than when they entered as Freshmen.” “College graduates are not adequately informed, interested, realistic, sensitive, and responsible so far as events and conditions outside the United States are concerned.”

These strong charges are supported by data from a carefully devised test on world affairs and geography given to nearly 2,000 college graduates from across the nation, by tallies of the courses directly or indirectly related to international and foreign concerns that were taken by some 1,600 graduates, and by a survey of the content of courses and texts that might give education on world affairs. A pedantic critic might argue over sampling techniques used, but this would be superficial. The work was thorough; the conclusions are sound.

What of education in church-related colleges? Are not its horizons widened by the universal thrust of the Gospel? Is it cosmopolitan as our initial assumption says it ought to be? While the Bidwell study does not single out church-related colleges as a separate population, it is helpful in answering these questions. The answers are not encouraging.

Reading for Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

* Reformation Studies, edited by Franklin H. Littell (John Knox, $5.50). Essays on both left-wing and classical personalities and movements of the Reformation.

* The New Bible Dictionary, edited by J. D. Douglas (Eerdmans, $12.95). First entirely new Bible dictionary since Hastings’. Its 2,300 new articles show loyalty to the Scriptures and carry the gains of recent advances in biblical studies. Illustrated.

* The Doctrine of Man in Classical Lutheran Theology, edited by Herman A. Preus and Edmund Smits (Ausburg $3). Disinterment of M. Chemnitz and J. Gerhard’s thought on image of God, free will, and sin. Much of it translated into English for the first time.

The liberal arts college graduates—and most church-related colleges fall in that class—scored lower than university graduates on the test, though they performed better than graduates of technical schools, complex colleges and teachers’ colleges. Also, the occasional references in the study to programs and courses especially effective in promoting international awareness do not indicate that the church-related colleges are giving their graduates an education unique in the breadth of its world vision. Nothing in the entire survey, except the fact that things are bad all over, gives comfort to those dedicated to Christian higher education.

This conclusion squares with what this reviewer knows about the church-related colleges he has surveyed. With occasional exception, such colleges are not strong in anthropology, political science including area-study programs and international relations, history of non-European cultures, and non-European languages. Using eight catalogues of accredited, church-related colleges readily at hand, I find that four offer no anthropology courses at all, three offer some courses which in each college are taught by a lone instructor without a Ph.D. degree, one offers a wide range of courses but at the time the catalogue went to press had no instructor for the next year. In all eight colleges political science courses were all taught by one person or by persons whose primary duty was in some other social science discipline. None had area-study courses. None had non-European foreign languages. Hopefully, this is a poor sample, but I doubt if it badly misrepresents most colleges known for strong denominational ties.

Recommendations made for changing this limitation on American undergraduate education are made by Bidwell. Changes in the curriculum, changes in general requirements, the infiltration of present courses with more materials drawn from foreign sources, and modifications in non-curricular programs, e.g., lectureships, convocations and study abroad, are all urged. Each presents its own problems. The curriculum is already crowded with requirements, college staffs are not broadly informed on foreign matters, the deep-in-the-rut mentality of tradition-bound professors, limitation of resources—all conspire to keep American education provincial.

Hopefully, the Bidwell study will stir American educators and especially educators in church-related colleges to adjust their instruction to the needs of a small, round world. But the stirring cannot be slight if it is to be successful.

WALFRED H. PETERSON

Completely Successful

The Story of the Church’s Song, by Millar Patrick, revised for American use by James Rawlings Sydnor (John Knox, 1962, 208 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by John Hamersma, Assistant Professor of Music, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Written with the Church Hymnary (the authorized hymnal of the Church of Scotland and others) in mind, this book was originally intended to complement the Handbook to that hymnal by placing its contents in historical perspective. The American edition performs this function for three outstanding American hymnals by referring the reader to them rather than to the Church Hymnary. The book, however, is useful in conjunction with any collection of standard hymns.

The American edition adds an appendix on American hymnody of the last three and one-half decades, footnotes referring the readers to additional information, an excellent bibliography, and additional hymns by the authors and composers cited by Dr. Patrick.

As an introduction to the study of hymnody Dr. Patrick’s book is completely successful. The compact chapters, the indexes, the bibliographies, and Dr. Sydnor’s footnotes make this a practical book for all who work with or are interested in the hymnody of the church. Readers will enjoy the author’s lively narrative, especially evident when, with obvious excitement, he treats the Psalters.

The value of the book might have been increased if quotations were acknowledged in footnotes and if the results of studies in hymnody made since 1927 were reflected in the text and not merely in Dr. Sydnor’s footnotes.

Sometimes Dr. Patrick’s mode of expression, retained in the American edition, does not make his meaning clear to American readers.

JOHN HAMERSMA

Milk Or Meat

Leading Little Ones to God, by Marian M. Schoolland (Eerdmans, 1962, 286 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Mary LeBar, Professor of Christian Education, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

For use at family worship or bedtime, this “child’s book of Bible teachings” is a nice combination of the devotional and doctrinal. In eighty-six short chapters a large number of Bible truths are explained simply and carefully. The chapters conclude with a few questions about content, a Bible verse which may be memorized, a suggested reading from the Bible, words of a song, and a prayer.

Style and content reflect the usual difficulties in trying to reach a wide range of ages. “Little ones” in the title, pictures of preschool children on the cover, the style of writing, and the simple presentation of elementary spiritual ideas, suggest that this is for the very young. But the content puts large emphasis on the Trinity and the Holy Spirit, and contains such difficult songs as “Spirit of God, dwell Thou within my heart; wean it from earth; through all its pulses move.” If this is the milk of the Word, what is the meat? Are parents able to adapt such materials to preschoolers and to children able to read for themselves?

MARY LEBAR

For Christian Mothers

Leading Little Ones to Jesus, by Jan Waterink (Zondervan, 1962, 119 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by Eugen Fandrich, Instructor in Psychology, United Baptist Bible Training School, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Dr. Waterink, internationally known Director of the Psychological Institute at the Free University of Amsterdam, offers guidance in this book “to Christian mothers in the all-important task of bringing up their pre-school and early school-age children.” This book already has gone through 19 Dutch editions.

The author’s style is generally conversational, but at times tends to be stolid and redundant. Though far from being exhaustive, the advice given reflects a background rich in psychology and Christian convictions.

The title, however, may be somewhat misleading to those not acquainted with Reformed theology (presupposed throughout the volume) as it applies to children. For example, while the book cautions parents against being deceived by a child’s early religious tendencies, it does not discuss “conversion” as a separate, unique experience necessary for the child. Hence the book would be incomplete to many not in the Reformed tradition.

EUGEN FANDRICH

The ‘End’ Of The Law

Law and Grace, by George A. F. Knight (SCM, 1962, 128 pp., 8s, 6d.; Westminster, $2.50), is reviewed by Ernest F. Kevan, Principal, London Bible College, England.

Much in the opening chapters is occupied with the customary critical redistribution of the Law of Moses, but thereafter the reader finds an excellent exposition of the reasons why the Law is still relevant. Romans 10:4 (Christ is “the end of the law”) is related to the chosen people of God and to Christian believers only as they are seen to be “graffed” into the olive tree of the people of God. He understands “end” in the sense of fulfillment or ultimate realization. Taking guidance from our Lord’s attitude to the Law, he considers that the fulfillment by Christian believers is to be in the same spirit of realizing what is at the heart of the Law, rather than a literalistic attitude of keeping rules and regulations. He sees evidence of the continuing significance of the Law in the large amount of moral instruction which the epistles contain, and concludes that sanctification must express itself in conformity to the requirements of the Law. The book demonstrates the unity of outlook and life which combine the Old Testament and the New, and moves in this newly-recovered direction in the exposition of Scripture. What is missing is the necessary emphasis on the obediential aspect of fulfilling the Law. Scripture suggests that the believer should do not only what the Law commands but also do it because the Law commands, and in dutiful submission to the majesty of God, his Creator and Redeemer.

E. F. KEVAN

Industrial Reform

The Responsible Company, by George Goyder (Blackwell, 1961, 200 pp., 21s.), is reviewed by Frank Gough, Assistant Secretary, Church Society, London.

Already half the industry of the United States of America and the United Kingdom is in the hands of a relatively few large groups of companies. The proportion is likely to increase with the popularity of mergers, and with the increase will come a rise in power of this large section of the community. Mr. Goyder, a prominent Church of England layman and an industrialist who is anxious to apply his faith to commerce, thinks a company’s legal duty is not restricted to its shareholders. Large companies in particular should acknowledge their separate responsibilities to employees, consumers, and the community.

Examples are given from both sides of the Atlantic of companies which have voluntarily tackled the problem of their social responsibility. Christians with industrial holdings, as well as company executives, will find this book stimulating, although some readers may write off much of it, in like manner as when Wilberforce suggested the abolition of slavery.

FRANK GOUGH

Quality Stimulation

Israel’s Prophetic Heritage, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson and Walter Harrelson (Harper, 1962, 242 pp., $5), is reviewed by David A. Hubbard, Chairman of Division of Biblical Studies and Philosophy, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

This collection of “essays in honor of James Muilenberg” of Union Theological Seminary is noteworthy both for the stature of its contributors and the readable quality of its contributions. Although aimed primarily at scholars, these studies are not unduly technical and exhibit a breadth of interest and clarity of expression which will commend them to pastors, teachers, and thoughtful laymen.

To list some of the contributors is to affirm the high caliber of the work: Walter Eichrodt (“In the Beginning,” a study of the interpretation of Genesis 1:1); Norman Porteous (“The Prophets and the Problem of Continuity,” where the role of Israel’s pious, nameless laymen in transmitting her faith is stressed); G. Ernest Wright (“The Lawsuit of God: A Form-critical Study of Deuteronomy 32”); Martin Noth (“The Background of Judges 17–18”); Samuel Terrien (“Amos and Wisdom,” an analysis of the prophet’s use of the techniques and motifs of Israel’s sages); Otto Eissfeldt (“The Promises of Grace to David in Isaiah 55:1–5,” centering in a comparison with Psalm 89); H. H. Rowley (“The Samaritan Schism in Legend and History,” questioning the statements of 2 Kings 17 and Ezra 4 that the Samaritans were a mixed people with a corrupt religion and fixing the real division between Jerusalem and Samaria in post-exilic politics); Millar Burrows (“Prophecy and the Prophets at Qumrân”).

Add to these, essays by Murray Newman, James F. Ross, Dorothea Harvey, Herbert G. May, and the editors, and you have a first-class contribution to Old Testament scholarship. If the conclusions drawn are not always congenial to conservatives, at least they will provide stimulus for thoughtful interaction.

DAVID A. HUBBARD

Checkreined

Science and Religion, edited by John Clover Monsma (Putnam’s, 1962, 253 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Henry Stob, Professor of Ethics and Apologetics, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Three years ago John Clover Monsma edited a volume entitled The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe to which 40 American scientists contributed brief essays favorable to religion. Dr. Monsma has this year edited another volume entitled Science and Religion to which 23 American theologians and churchmen have contributed essays favorable to science. The least that one can learn from these volumes is, accordingly, that 63 scholars, qualified to express an opinion, judge that science and religion are compatible. How much more one can learn from them depends upon what one knows, or thinks one knows, about either science or religion.

The most recent volume, which is the subject of this notice, is obviously written for the layman. It moves on a popular level, and very few of the essays illumine the problem at any depth. Some of them are merely witnesses to the fact that the authors believe in Christianity and in the Bible in spite of the fact that science exists. These essays are obviously not very helpful to one who is seriously challenged by scientific imperialism, and they might without injury have been omitted from the collection. Others are merely analytical and make varying approaches to an authentic apologia, but none of the essays quite succeed in doing what each of the authors could undoubtedly do if he were given his head and provided with adequate space. As it is, each is given about ten pages, and in this space no one, I suspect, quite comes into his own.

The essayists are, all of them, respectable scholars, and taken jointly they cover the American religious spectrum. Among them is one Jew—Felix Aber; four Roman Catholics—A. F. Horrigan, B. Bonansea, E. McMullin, and J. F. Piefer; eight Calvinists—A. H. Leitch, J. H. Gerstner, J. T. Galloway, A. K. Rule, P. K. Jewett, W. C. Robinson, C. G. Singer, and R. W. Gray; three Lutherans—J. T. Mueller, R. W. Hedberg, and G. Lund; three Baptists—E. T. Dahlberg, E. C. Rust, and M. C. Tenney; three Methodists—G. LI. Kennedy, I. L. Holt, and G. E. Thomas; and one Episcopalian—J. C. Petrie.

These considerable thinkers say what they have to say in their own characteristic way. The Roman Catholic essayists do a very creditable job, mainly in the Thomist manner. Those who speak most to this reviewer’s condition are some, though not all, of the Reformed essayists. Particularly good is the essay “Towards Real Mutuality” by A. K. Rule, and outstanding is that by J. H. Gerstner on “The Science-Religion Conflict: its True Locus.” Dr. Gerstner understands that it is in the area where Christian theology and natural and historical science overlap—as in the biblical assertions about “facts”—that the conflict between science and religion arises and needs resolving.

To those making their first considerable acquaintance with the science-religion problem this volume of essays will not be unprofitable, although something more than this will need doing if Christianity is to speak in a truly meaningful fashion to the unbelieving scientific community.

HENRY STOB

Experience Of Joy

The Lively Tradition, by John H. Vruwink (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962, 199 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Donald W. Mayberry, Rector, St. John’s Church, Washington, D.C.

Joy, declares John Vruwink, comes from God; it enters our hearts, sins, frailty, cowardice, weakness; our sharing in it is incomplete if we do not participate in Christ’s exaltation, resurrection and enthronement; the Eucharist is a vehicle by which all may participate in the joy. Herein is the medium in which the reader is invited to move.

The author, an Episcopalian, writes of his subject simply, clearly, and attempts to structure his book for consumption by all laymen, be they Protestants or Roman Catholics. Whether or not one feels he succeeds (and the book is a welcome attempt to find and use some common elements of our religious heritage), one cannot help but sense that the author writes from a deep personal Christian experience which knows the joy whereof he speaks. He is excited about his subject; he has discovered something vital and wants to share it. Although, as he admits himself, “the life of joy cannot be described.… It must be lived,” nevertheless, one is caught by the author’s sense of discovery and is led to participate in “The Lively Tradition.”

On the negative side of the picture, John Vruwink sometimes loses one in unnecessary detail and reiteration. The mortar of man’s problems, occasionally, is thicker than the bricks of God’s joy which are laid in that mortar. One is led to anticipate with too much expectation the last chapter, which is on the Eucharist, as climax to profound God-man communication. The Eucharist may be all that, but one brings to the final chapter such an expanse of problems needing fulfillment, and is led by the earlier care in presentation to expect so much, that the chapter cannot hold fully the weight of the burden. However, it is a fine chapter and, taken on its own merits, is a good reading experience.

There is a sense of freshness to the book, a living of a discovery with the author, a healthy and often overlooked dimension of God’s relationship to man laid bare.

Donald W. Mayberry

How We Got Here

Christum Thought from Erasmus to Berdyaev, by Matthew Spinka (Prentice-Hall, 1962, 246 pp., $6.60), is reviewed by James Daane, Editorial Associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

I do not know whether people 600 years ago sang songs about “what the modern world is coming to.” We do know what it did come to, and Spinka tells us how it got there.

“The Era Is Dying: Let It Die!” This is the title of the first chapter of Spinka’s book and under it he presents his thesis. The Renaissance era which began six centuries ago by making man the center of the world and the measure of all things has now run its course, borne its consequences, and its consequences are such that they spell “Finis,” the end of an era. The humanist experiment in thinking and living without God has now exhausted its energies and possibilities. The consequences which were inherent in its beginnings, the hidden contradictions implicit in its presuppositions, have now become explicit and actualized in history. What began as an experiment in getting along without God has declared, in the emptiness of our time, the loss of authentic humanity and human values. The attempt to establish an individualism without reference to a transcendent spiritual world has resulted in a loss of individuality which now desperately seeks compensation in a collectivism clothed with the garments of divinity. The attempt to live solely out of the resources of the human has turned upon itself into an anti-humanistic secularism. The Renaissance man who set out to bestride the universe like a god has ended his labors a victim of modern impersonal organizations and totalitarian collectivisms.

With skilled hand Spinka unravels the processes by which the pre-Renaissance Christian ideas of man and God slowly but progressively turned into their opposite in the thought of both Christians and non-Christians, from Descartes to Berdyaev. Spinka traces the progress of both Continental rationalism and British empiricism from their origin in the thought of Descartes. He then shows how Kant dealt with the resultant impasse, and how post-Kantian thinkers developed the various strains of materialistic and idealistic thought as they issued from Kant. Spinka concludes with an analysis of such Russian thinkers as Dostoevsky and Berdyaev who predicted the end of the era of humanism and countered its dehumanizing materialistic and mechanistic reduction of man by urging the reality and exercise of man’s spirit and freedom.

Spinka does not have to prove his thesis. Life has done that. He has written rather that men may see that the human, spiritual, moral crisis of our time was implicit in the humanist experiment and was its inevitable outcome.

The author has sprinkled his always lucid analysis with just enough biographical material to provide a flesh and blood context and heightened reader interest.

There are few, if any, finer critiques of the history of modern thought from the Christian perspective. The material is taken largely from Spinka’s lectures of the past 15 years. But anyone interested in the history of modern thought, or either fascinated or troubled by our disjointed world, will find this book once opened, difficult to close.

JAMES DAANE

Book Brief

Sermons for the Junior Congregation, by George W. Bowman III (Baker, 1962, 118 pp., $1.95). Brief, evangelical sermonettes; with suggested illustrative materials.

Saints and Scholars, by David Knowles (Cambridge University Press, 1962, 208 pp., $3.95, 22s. 6d.; also in paperback at $1.65, 9s. 6d.). A collection of 25 character sketches of such medievals as Bede, Anselm, Roger Bacon, and William More. With two exceptions, all are taken from the author’s Monastic Order in England and his three-volume Religious Orders in England. Done in quality.

The Process of Education, by Jerome S. Bruner (Harvard University Press, 1960, 97 pp., $2.75). Thirty-five scientists and educators conferring on science curriculum for pre-college pupils reach interesting conclusions, notably about structure and intuitive learning.

Handbook of Church Administration, by Lowell Russell Ditzen (Macmillan, 1962, 390 pp., $7). A detailed guide for the administration of the multitudinous affairs of the local church; it could save a pastor from madness, or drive him there.

Handbook of Preaching Resources from English Literature, edited by James Douglas Robertson (Macmillan, 1962, 268 pp., $5). Hardly a resource for preaching (as title claims) but a better than average collection of literary allusions to enhance it.

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A fortnightly report of developments in religion

The 100-member Central Committee of the World Council of Churches met at Cité Universitaire, Paris, August 7–17, under the chairmanship of Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the Lutheran Church in America. Two Roman Catholic priests were on hand as observers. Two East German members of the committee were absent because their government would not grant travel permits. The committee was primarily concerned with implementing decisions of the New Delhi assembly. Their theme for the Paris meeting: “The Finality of Jesus Christ in an Age of Universal History.”

Referring to an invitation to send observers to the Second Vatican Council, Dr. Fry said: “This is the first time in history that observers from so many confessions are invited to follow the proceedings of a council of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Dr. A. A. Fulton of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland advised the committee that membership in the WCC has been vigorously attacked in some quarters of his church. “If the council decides to send observers to the Vatican Council,” he pointed out, “it might make the work of those of us who contend for membership harder.”

The committee accepted the Vatican invitation nevertheless and appointed Dr. Lukas Vischer, 35-vear-old member of the WCC Geneva staff as one of two observers. The other will be named later. The committee stressed that the observers will have no authority to speak officially on behalf of the WCC but allowed that they may give “informal explanations of the purposes and actions of the World Council.”

Another highlight of the committee meeting was the approval for WCC membership of seven more church groups—including five from the Soviet Union (see adjoining box).

General Secretary W. A. Visser’t Hooft called for “genuine dialogue” between Protestant and Roman Catholic churches as the next step toward Christian unity. German Bishop Hans Lilje asked about the character of the “dialogue.” Dr. Visser’t Hooft replied that this would depend on the decisions of the Vatican Council in the realm of interchurch relations including such matters as religious liberty, mixed marriages, and the deeper theological issue of the nature of the Church.

The General Secreary also said: “There is in many of our churches a sense of defeatism about their task in the world. So often the world lives and thinks and talks as if there were no Church in existence. And the gulf between the intellectual and ideological forces shaping our civilization and the thought and witness of the Church seems to be growing wider all the time.”

Actions Of The Central Committee

Seven more church groups were approved for membership in the World Council of Churches by its policy-making Central Committee in Paris this month. The action gave the WCC a total of 201 member churches.

The new churches include five from the Soviet Union: the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (with 500,000 members), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Estonia (350,000), the Union of Evangelical Christian Baptists of the USSR (545,000), the Georgian Orthodox Church (with 100 churches), and the Armenian Apostolic Church with headquarters in Etchmiadzin (4,500,000, including 1,400,000 living outside the USSR).

Also added were the Armenian Apostolic Church—Catholicate of Cilicia (498,000) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa—South-East Region (75,587).

A report to the committee told of preparations for a major world conference on faith and order to be held in Montreal, July 12–26, 1963. A spokesman said the WCC will insure that evangelicals from non-member churches will be represented despite the feeling that “the intransigence or misrepresentation in some of these quarters may discourage us into thinking that these are completely barren pastures for the practice of ecumenism.

Addressing the assembly on its theme, British Congregationalist Dr. John Marsh likened man to a satellite in orbit, separate from the planet from which he has been launched, vet fulfilling his function only as he remains in proper orbital relation to his launching base. “The world of creatures,” he said, “has been ‘set in orbit’ by the Creator, given a life of its own, and yet must live always as an ‘orbital life’ related at depth to God. The duties of the Christian community, then, are to respect the integrity of the secular, and so to accept responsibility for it and within it, knowing that whatever the course of history proves to be, God is complicit in it, and that its outcome is already assured.”

Dr. Marsh denied that “conversion” means leaving one religion that has no truth for one that has nothing but truth.

Speaking on the same subject, the Rev. T. Paul Verghese, priest of the Syrian Orthodox Church, new associate secretary of the WCC and former private secretary to Ethiopian Emporer Haile Selassie, said: “The charge of ‘Fellow-travelling,’ of being a ‘Com-symp’ (Communist sympathizer), is a frightening and tyrannical force in many parts of the world today, disrupting community both at a world-wide and at national and domestic levels. The Christian faith should be able to deliver us from our bondage to this tyranny. Christ was and is the Master Fellow-traveller and we cannot afford to be less. He was and is the ‘all-symp,’ and we have to share in his universal sympathy. The WCC itself is hamstrung in its approach to Christians in the socialist countries by fear of being tarred and lampooned as ‘com-symps.’ Neither can we afford to neglect one-fourth of humanity in our human community by keeping People’s China out of the United Nations.”

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, director of the council’s Division of World Mission and Evangelism, addressed a series of searching questions to the committee. Why is the missionary advance of the Church so slow? Why are the missionary forces of the Church apparently so immobile, so completely exhausted by the effort to remain where they are? Why is it that missionaries sent out by the churches which belong to the WCC are a decreasing proportion of the total force? Why is it that missionary has become a “bad word” in many Christian circles? Why is it that among the best and most devoted young people in our churches one hears it said, “Anything, anywhere, as long as it is not a missionary”?

Bishop Newbigin, veteran missionary to India, acknowledged that there had been too much reluctance to admit that the era of history in which modern missions achieved its great triumph was ended. He added that there were still some people who are “surprised when one speaks of the missionary responsibility of African Christians for the unconverted pagans of Europe.”

He quoted the divisional statement which said that “half the world is hungry, and we are learning to share our bread.… There is a hunger from which no part of the world is free, and there is no bread that can satisfy that hunger except Jesus Christ.”

J. D. D.

The Word In Helsinki

Arriving several weeks prior to the opening session of last month’s Communist-sponsored World Youth Festival in Helsinki, a 25-man Pocket Testament League deputation began preparations which were to culminate in the distribution of over 100,000 copies of the gospel of John and in the proclamation of the Christian message in over 20 languages. By the end of the conference, it was apparent that the PTL had achieved a greater success in attaining its goals than the members of the Communist party had in theirs. The Communists had boasted that two million young people would be turned to communism as a result of the week-long jamboree.

By all reports, the free world in Finland had turned a cool and sometimes hostile face to the eighth world congress of the Communist youth. During the first four days, noisy street demonstrations diminished the spirit of the meetings. More than 50 of the festival delegates defected to the West before the congress ended, and many others returned home disillusioned. Throughout it all, members of the PTL task force continued to distribute gospels to the delegates. Nearly 90,000 went to Finnish-speaking peoples. Over 10,000 scriptures were distributed in other languages. Observed team member Larry McGuill, “I am convinced that we have been used of God in distributing his Word, which has become a deterrent factor in the forward movement of the Communist philosophy.”

The Christian witness was present in less structured occurrences as well. At a Communist-sponsored seminar on “The Problems of Peace and National Independence,” a young Harvard graduate and a member of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, took the floor to rebut a charge that American missionaries were used to foster the “colonial aims” of the United States. Replied Fred Notehelfer, whose parents are presently missionaries in Japan, “The United States has had a long history of separation of Church and State.”

In a later statement, Notehelfer told the press that the “American position has been very poorly represented at the festival thus far, if at all.” He believed that the directors of the festival had devised procedures which made it “very difficult” for defenders of the United States to speak.

PTL members discovered that a “very difficult” situation was often outright and physical hostility in respect to the distribution of the Gospel. Nevertheless, concluded Baptist minister Dr. Charles W. Anderson, “multitudes have heard the true message of lasting peace through the blood of Calvary’s Cross.”

Remarked one Finnish woman as the PTL embarked, “You have taught us how to meet people with the Gospel face to face. Please pray that we shall rise to the opportunities that are presented to us here in our own city during these days.”

Shared Time Test

The first planned trial of “shared time” education begins this fall in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, where Roman Catholic high schools will send students to a new public technical school on a part-time basis.

Dr. Carl F. Reuss, director of research and social action of the American Lutheran Church, predicted this month that the Supreme Court prayer ruling will lead to growing support for the “shared time” plan.

A comprehensive analysis of the concept by Louis Cassels, UPI religion writer, appeared in the August 28 issue of Look. “So far,” says Cassels, “no one has questioned the desirability of the goals or the constitutionality of the approach. The argument has centered around the practicality of the plan.”

Under shared time, pupils may attend religious schools for some courses and public school for others.

[See also, “Will Clergy Back ‘shared Time’ School Plan?,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, March 30, 1962.]

Singing On The Mountain

On Tuesday the crowds began arriving. By Saturday night 10,000 were camped on the slopes of North Carolina’s 5964-foot Grandfather Mountain. By Sunday afternoon, when evangelist Billy Graham arrived, some 75,000 had crowded to the site of the 38th annual “Singing on the Mountain,” joining in on the old revival hymns and waiting expectantly to hear the sermon. Because of a 50-mile long traffic tie-up, thousands of others had been kept away.

The event was one of Graham’s rare appearances in his home state, and it was characterized by a proclamation of the same Gospel which the evangelist has preached throughout the world. When the sermon had ended and the evangelist had asked the listeners to give themselves to God, hundreds responded with uplifted hands.

An observer might well have altered Goldsmith’s phrase to say, “And those who came to sing, remained to pray.”

Starting At The Bite

The following report was prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Arthur H. Matthews of The Presbyterian Journal:

“One day the great state universities may be ringed with residential colleges like this.”

That’s the dream of the Rev. W. Jack Lewis, founder-director of the controversial Christian Faith and Life Community of Austin, Texas. The community is made up of University of Texas students who live and study together under a code which is getting wide attention as the “Austin Experiment” and showing signs of having great influence on denominational and interdenominational work at campuses throughout America. It begins its tenth year this fall on the heels of serious internal strife which split the ranks.

Growing pains notwithstanding, the community is still very much in business on a miniature campus of its own adjacent to the grounds of the University of Texas. Physical facilities embrace nearly a square block. Officials say the community has $100,000 equity in some $356,000 worth of property. The budget for the coming year, however, will force cutbacks in the program. The overall figure is expected to be $93,000 or about $15,000 less than in 1961–62.

Far more serious is the personnel toll. Eight of 13 theologically-trained staff members pulled away at the end of the 1961–62 session, led by Joseph W. Mathews, who was program director. The entire faction won employment at the Evanston Ecumenical Institute, recently linked with the Church Federation of Greater Chicago. Mathews will serve as dean of the institute.

The split was attributed to a “problem of communications” among staff members.

The Austin Experiment is expected to attract only about 50 students to reside in the community’s “college house” this year, compared with 100 last year.

But while the Austin experimenters are retrenching and taking stock, their ideas will be used in 50 or more colleges and universities across the nation.

Campus ministers and student workers of all denominations have been beating a path to Austin for the past several years, and “almost all the campus ministers who have been here have picked up part of the program,” according to the Rev. Robert R. Bryant, chairman of the community’s collegium (teaching staff). Officials of the experiment said their patterns have been used in such universities as Brown, Penn State, Emory, Iowa, Duke, Wisconsin and Georgia. In other places, the student programs will follow the Austin plan for the first time this September.

Influence of the community will not be limited to those campuses where a program has followed the Austin pattern. Staff members are in great demand as speakers. Ideas on theological study and worship from the community are showing up increasingly in the literature and programs of several denominations.

What’s unique about the community? Mr. Lewis said the plan grew out of his frustration as a Presbyterian campus minister at the University of Texas in the post-World War II days. He went to Europe and observed the evangelical academies and came back with the idea of a “residential college” architecturally similar to the Cambridge-Oxford residential colleges. He started the community “for the recovery of the ministry of the laity toward the continuing renewal of the church in her mission to the world.”

Participants in the community have agreed to covenant together to participate in certain worship services and some ten hours of group study a week—in addition to regular university studies. “Life together” in the community-operated dormitories and dining hall are a part of the regimen. The community is “ecumenical” in that the participants come from any and all churches or from no church at all.

There is no church connection. A self-perpetuating board gets operating funds from foundations and individuals primarily. Some sympathetic persons have seen that their church budgets included $200 or $300 per year for Austin. Last year the United Church of Christ Board of Homeland Ministries and the American Lutheran Church’s Luther League each gave $1,000. For five years, beginning in 1956, the Danforth Foundation of St. Louis contributed $15,000 annually. (The same foundation has also sent three seminary interns to Austin.)

Does the community, hailed in a forthcoming book as a norm for U.S. Protestant campus work, have a theology?

“We do not begin with a concern for a formulated doctrine,” Mr. Bryant explained. He said the community’s method of theological education is to “start at the point where the bite comes on the life of the individual.” Asked for the community’s position on the Bible, Mr. Bryant replied that “the statement of what is scripture is not crucial to our times.”

The chairman of the collegium protested that “to put into cryptic statements” what the community believes and teaches “is to reduce it falsely.” Mr. Lewis added that the community’s theology is “not philosophical existentialism, but experimental.”

What do the community’s students study? Mr. Bryant said they utilize writings of “the Church fathers—Luther, Calvin, Knox, Schleiermacher and Rauschenbusch—as well as the modern thinkers.” Emphasized among the “modern thinkers” are such writers as Kirkegaard, Tillich, Bultmann and the Niebuhrs.

Persons joining the community’s staff are not “tied to any particular formulation” of doctrine but are “familiar with or involved in the theologizing of our times,” according to Mr. Bryant. “They are also thoroughly and unequivocally a part of the Church,” he added.

“The Church” for which the community considers itself a pioneering and research agency is “made up of all denominations.” And while liturgies of several denominations are used, much of the worship material is original. Examples are the singing of the Apostles’ Creed to the tune of “Colonel Bogey March” and the Lord’s Prayer to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda.”

Not only does Mr. Lewis expect his pattern to be adopted or adapted by many university ministries, but his backers also hope it will have an impact on the lay programs of the churches. Laymen attending weekend sessions often go home to “covenant together” with other laymen and/or their pastors to be a “core” of lay theologians working for the “renewal” of their congregations.

Princeton Seminary President James I. McCord, a member of the community’s national advisory council, suggested about a year ago that the term “experiment” could no longer be properly applied. Staff members agree that the institution is firmly established, but they maintain that their work will continue to be experimental.

A lengthy report adopted by the Presbytery of Northeast Texas (Presbyterian U.S.) at the height of a recent furor over the community noted that while the community is experimental, “it is experiment in one direction primarily.” And, the presbytery report continued, “Christian existentialism” best describes the “fundamental stance of the theologizing of the community.”

The Sabbatarians

Solomon Island fuzzy wuzzies, Amazon River boatmen, and 1,300 delegates from 100 other countries moved with energy and color into San Francisco last month for the Seventh-day Adventists’ 49th World Conference. Their stated mission in the West Coast’s most exotic city was “to review the past four years, elect a staff of the general conference, and lay plans for the next four years.”

Sabbath services saw some 29,000 persons pour into the Cow Palace and adjoining halls, and regular conference sessions left standing room only in the Civic Auditorium.

As expected, America’s 335,000 SDA members were urged to fight blue laws. R. R. Hegstad, the denomination’s world religious liberty secretary, asked the convention, “When a man is forced by law to rest on a day other than that which he regards as the Sabbath, how can the exercise of his religion be called free?” Hegstad reminded cheering delegates, “It was to escape their neighbor’s religion that our forefathers came to America.”

Seventh-day Adventists are the only Protestant denomination operating with one unified organizational and financial structure in 196 countries. Known for financial soundness and close-knit organizational efficiency, the church is divided into 13 divisions, each comprising union conferences which in turn are composed of local conferences. Theodore Carcich of Lincoln, Nebraska, was elected president of the North American Division.

Conference speakers repeatedly noted phenomenal growth, far-flung advance in all parts of the world, and plans for the future “broader than any of the past.” Statistics of recent expansion lent substance to the dreams and credibility to their fulfillment. The four years since the last world conference were reported to be the church’s most successful missionary period: It was reported that 355,436 converts were brought into the membership of the church through baptism—a number roughly equivalent to the total membership of the North American Division, the church’s largest. The South American Division reported 42,385 new members from 1958 to 1961 and compared this to the 52 years it took to obtain the first 42,000.

Today there are 1,307,892 Seventh-day Adventists in 196 countries, and an estimated 563,617 in Sabbath schools preparing for baptism.

Sabbath school membership in Korea soared from 18,426 in 1958 to 72,019 in 1961. C. P. Sorensen, president of the Far Eastern Division, told the conference that “it was largely the result of Vacation Bible School evangelism, followed by branch Sabbath School evangelism.”

SDAs operate 4,821 schools and colleges, two universities, 108 hospitals, 111 clinics, 42 publishing houses, publish 293 periodicals and religious literature in 228 languages.

Observers are frequently baffled by Adventism’s bristling energy and rapid growth. Adventists themselves speak frequently of “miracles” wrought through them by God, and of the urgency “to finish the work” so that Christ may soon return. Their restless drive and sustained dedication reflects their conviction that they are within the Christian community a distinct people with a distinct calling and task. Unlike traditional Christians—whom they acknowledge as such—they believe themselves especially chosen of God to bring “God’s last word” in the present crisis of the world’s end-time. Although conscious of no diminution of the New Testament’s understanding of eschatology, they derive their sense of calling and of existence in the world’s end-time more from a nineteenth-century event—Christ’s cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary, to which they trace their historical origin—than to the teaching of the end and the nearness of Christ’s return as set forth in the New Testament’s explanation of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

The distinctive faith that they are a special people by special divine election for a special task of gospel proclamation at a special time in history not only accounts for the distinctive SDA spiritual outlook and sense of calling. It also accounts for a fostered disinterest in any possible union or ecumenical affiliation with their Christian brethren. Explicitly committed to proselyting, and eager to have other Christians join them, they are predisposed by religious conviction against joining with others.

Referring to Adventists as “God’s last men in the world” and as “the last men of God,” Francis D. Nichol, editor of the church’s official weekly Review and Herald asked in a Sabbath evening conference sermon, “How could we, in good faith, become a part of any other all-inclusive movement? We can be true to the logic of our beliefs only as we stand alone.”

In protest against the segregation practices of some of its schools, 1,000 Adventist Negroes met on a Sunday in the jack Tar Hotel under the leadership of Negro Dr. Frank W. Hale, Jr. During the protest session, the General Conferences elected Negro Frank L. Peterson as a vice president of its powerful World General Council, the fourth Negro currently holding an elective position in the church world headquarters. A request of the protesting group for a hearing at the world conference was denied by Reuben R. Figuhr, who was re-elected conference president, as was the demand that desegregation in all Adventist schools be enforced by the church’s highest authoritative council. Figuhr contended that North American segregation was a local problem and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the General Conference with its world scope.

Figuhr also expressed regret for the “misguided” efforts of the Protestants, contending that resolution of an admitted problem must be resolved progressively and within the church, and not abruptly by authoritative enforcement compelled by an external pressure group. Top officials of the church admitted the existence of the problem in some areas and pledged new efforts to bring SDA practice into harmony with its convictions.

Pap smears and cholesterol tests were given to volunteering conferees by medical research workers from Loma Linda University, an SDA school. Adventists have an unusual religious interest in health and diet. Because they avoid smoking, tea and coffee, and eat little or no meat, they present unusual opportunities for medical research into the diseases of heart and cancer.

J. D.

Mennonites En Masse

Under the watchful eye of Queen Elizabeth, whose 15-foot portrait illuminated the front wall of the hockey arena, Mennonites enjoyed their largest and most representative Glaubenskonferenz. Nearly 10,000 of them spent the first seven days of August in the twin Ontario towns of Kitchener and Waterloo for the seventh World Mennonite Conference. The ecclesiastical inferiority complex associated with Mennonites was passé. For at least this once, the Anabaptists’ children in the faith appeared a strong Christian force.

Chief business was adoption of an 800-word “message” to Mennonite congregations of the world, calling upon them “to repentance and a genuine renewal of faith and life, so that our confession that Jesus is Lord may be made real and effective.” The call took its cue from the theme of the non-legislative conference, “The Lordship of Christ.”

Conference highlight was a soft-spoken rebuke of Mennonite factionalism and a plea for mutual respect and stimulation by ailing Dean Harold S. Bender of Goshen College Biblical Seminary. Bender, president of the World Conference, is recuperating after being stricken with cancer. His conference appearances were limited to week-end sessions.

Bender stressed that his appeal for cooperation was not to be construed as groundwork for a super-church. He remarked that he has been accused of being an “Old Mennonite ecumaniac.”

“But I love Mennonites,” he said, “and if that’s a sin, then I stand convicted.”

Bender also prepared the keynote address of the conference. It was delivered for him by Dr. Erland Waltner, conference vice president. The address was one of a series given on various aspects of the Lordship of Christ by key? Mennonite churchmen.

Selection of Kitchener as world conference site was based largely on the fact that it embraces one of the world’s largest concentrations of Mennonites. Most are of the German variety (Kitchener has more people of German descent than any other city in Canada), but several varieties of Mennonites have churches in the vicinity. Sessions held in the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium attracted capacity crowds, which in itself made the 100,000 residents of Kitchener and Waterloo sit up and take notice. Direct impact of the conference was felt as far away as Toronto, 73 miles to the east, where newspapers carried daily accounts of the proceedings. The mass media outreach was enhanced by an efficient press room operated by Maynard Shelly, editor of The Mennonite, official organ of the General Conference Mennonite Church.

Virtually every variation of the Anabaptist tradition was represented at Kitchener, with the notable exception of the Amish, whose disdain for even a very loose organization persists.

Mennonites from Communist lands had been invited, but none appeared. Peter J. Dyck, European director of the Mennonite Central Committee, reported that an estimated 45,000 Mennonites in Russia are settled primarily in the southeasterly part of the country near the Chinese border. Because their religion is not recognized by the government, they must worship with Baptists or meet secretly in private homes.

“Though there are clear signs of a spiritual awakening,” Dyck said, “many ethnic Mennonites are not interested in church life and some are militant atheists and Communists.”

The world Mennonite membership now stands at more than 400,000 (not including 200,000 children), with over half of this total in North America. Virtually all Mennonites are pacifists of one kind or another.¹* The Rev. Nelson Litwiller, missionary to Uruguay and president of a Mennonite seminary in Montevideo, publicized a satirical prayer for inhabitants of fallout shelters: They believe in a strong separation of church and state. For the most part they have favored plain dress, and many men still wear collarless coats. Only a few bearded men were on hand at Kitchener, but about half the women appeared with “prayer veils”—white mesh head covers. By contrast, a number of the younger women came with ear rings, makeup and spike heels.

The Rev. Vincent Harding, Mennonite Negro minister who was recently jailed in Albany, Georgia, for his part in an anti-segregation demonstration, charged that the brotherhood is not doing enough to fight racial discrimination.

Theologically, the Mennonites are largely numbered among the evangelicals in the Arminian camp. Nineteenth-century liberalism, however, swept up a number of Mennonite theologians (one Mennonite observer asserts that some drifted almost to Unitarianism). The liberal impact was greatest upon the Mennonites of Holland, but it did not last. Today the leading Dutch Mennonites are known to espouse Barthian views.

Mennonites are often thought of as a rural people and very separatist. Yet they have a strong cultural interaction, particularly in education and art. Percentage-wise, Mennonites are well-educated; earned doctorates abound among church leaders to an extent which matches or surpasses that of larger denominations. Mennonite artists are also a distinguished lot, and their works are exhibited in no fewer than 19 major U. S. museums. A representative art exhibit was a feature of the Kitchener conference.

The happy fellowship and avoidance of controversy at Kitchener will doubtless have a wholesome long-range effect upon the Mennonite brotherhood. But no one seemed willing to predict immediate merger talks among the separated groups, of which there are more than a dozen in North America. The largest of these are the Mennonite Church (“Old Mennonite”) with nearly 80,000 members, the General Conference Mennonite Church with 55,000, and the Mennonite Brethren Church with 26,000.

Though Mennonites are sensitive about their differences, cooperative efforts enjoy considerable scope (missions, publishing, relief work, education).

The General Conference Mennonite Church convened its own 36th triennial meeting in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, immediately following the Kitchener conference. Some 700 delegates were on hand. They approved artificial birth control as not an “evil,” but condemned abortion as a “sin” and divorce as “contrary to the will of God.”

The views were expressed in a policy statement on “The Christian Family.” To prevent broken marriages, the statement called for “courses of instruction for young people on courtship and marriage provided through the church fellowship.” Concerning mixed marriages, the statement said that religious convictions should be strong ties between husbands and wives. “Young people need to take this into careful consideration even in courtship and especially before considering engagement to anyone of a different religious background.”

Delegates also voted to write President Kennedy “to emphasize their church’s stand against nuclear testing.”

Most important issue to come before the Bethlehem conference was a nine-point statement on the authority of the Scriptures prepared by a study commission. The statement referred to the Scriptures as “an adequate, authentic, and sufficient vehicle of divine revelation” and as “the witness to the revelatory events of God in Christ.” After three days of discussion the statement was adopted by a vote of 1434 to 72. An explanatory supplement prepared by the commission said the term “inerrancy is often interpreted as to mean different things to different people. It is wise, therefore, to stay with biblical terminology …”

Keswick 1962

“Oh dear,” sighed the vacationing matron as she strode into the dining-room of a lakeside hotel. “It’s such a relief to get back to some peace after visiting Keswick with all those convention people about.” She spoke too soon, for just then a man seated with six ladies said a loud grace which killed conversation and embarrassed neighboring diners. The convention, like its 86 predecessors, had for a week taken over the little Lake District town. Sacred cow to some, a kind of cult to others, England’s Keswick convention brings together each year 7,000 people in search of practical holiness.

Naturally it arouses criticism, some of it justified. “The Keswick message?” echoed an Air Force chaplain, “there’s no such thing—or there ought not to be. It’s either the Christian message or it’s not!” The predilection for intensely devotional hymns made one Church of Scotland minister long for the sound of a metrical psalm or one of the great Trinitarian hymns. Fragments of gospel hymns drifted out of open windows. One house party was singing “Let me come closer to Thee, Lord Jesus,” probably unaware that this great Keswick favorite had been written by a monk who believed that our Lord was in the Sacrament on the altar. Down by the lake a large group was lustily rendering one of those odious evangelical medleys which seem to consist of snatches of hymns and choruses strung together haphazardly.

Near the big tent a somewhat ragged gentleman reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet passed with slow dignity, holding aloft a placard bearing the simple inscription “YHWH.” At the corner a gospel van festooned with texts roared through a stop sign.

The main meetings, relayed by radio and land lines to more than 90 points of the United Kingdom, were conducted in the most reverent spirit, and the impression was given that here indeed were people who had come to do business with the living God. Other impressions included the wisdom of the I.V.F. camp commandant in organizing an amateur concert with never a hymn-book in sight … the courage of a former Spanish Roman Catholic priest and his moving testimony … surprise and dismay at seeing the vast numbers of different religious societies … the new speaker who departed a little from tradition and gave a powerful and refreshingly different message from the Old Testament … most of all, the enormous task of organization efficiently and unobtrusively carried out.

The story was told of how F. B. Meyer gave such a searching address on one occasion that the town’s Post Office ran out of postal orders, so great was the run on them to settle unpaid debts. The convention now has its own Post Office.

J. D. D.

The Unequal Yoke

A British Member of Parliament has put a question to the Home Secretary in the House of Commons about the granting of a visa to James Taylor, wealthy New York businessman who makes frequent visits to Britain as the international leader of one section of the “Close” or “Exclusive” Brethren. Another M.P. has forwarded to the Home Secretary a petition signed by 1,000 people in a small Scottish town, asking for a public inquiry into the activities of the Close Brethren in Scotland and their effect on family life. The three men who presented it claimed that the sect had broken up their home lives. One of them is a Baptist, but his wife and daughter have joined the Close Brethren and have left his house to live a few yards away with his wife’s parents. Two weeks ago he attended a meeting of the Brethren and was allowed to speak to his wife for ten minutes.

An unsigned letter which appeared in the August issue of The Harvester, but which was completely untypical of that evangelical publication, says at one point: “What fellowship can light have with darkness? It is time a halt was called and assembly principles restated. What do we stand for? Are we not those to whom God has given the light? Have we not the truth? The one doctrine above all others that needs to be taught and emphasized today is that of separation.”

The enforcement of this policy has been made in striking ways since Mr. Taylor succeeded his father as leader. The mailed fist became apparent two years ago when a dispute seriously disrupted the fishing communities along the Moray Firth in northeast Scotland. A pooled price scheme, devised to ensure a fair deal for all engaged in the herring industry, was repudiated by fishermen associated with the Exclusive Brethren because St. Paul said, and a latter-day apostle of their own movement from America had underlined it, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” Brethren, who owned about half of the 80 boats sailing out of Peterhead, would no longer eat their meals at the same table as “nonbelievers.” Separate mealtimes did not always provide a practicable solution, and one account tells how righteousness was fulfilled by sawing a table down the middle so that it was technically two tables, though the halves were never parted. One Brethren adherent who had operated a boat with his brother for several years, withdrew himself and his crew. His brother, unable to find a crew, offered to sell out to him, but the other, who did not hold a skipper’s ticket, was unable to accept. The result was that the boat was no use to either.

Information about the sect is hard to come by, but its comprehensive list of prohibitions includes trade unions, cosmetics, tobacco, school uniforms, paid clergy, women’s haircuts, TV, radio (except aboard their fishing vessels), voting, military service, wedding toasts, and “mixed” marriages. A recent decree says that liquor must be on the tables during meals, as a sign that members of the sect have the will power not to touch it. Found in all occupations and classes, they will not discuss their activities with those outside the assembly, and no data are available for estimating their numerical strength.

In past months some glaring publicity has come their way. A press report told of a 21-year-old who committed suicide after his parents were ordered by the Exclusive Brethren to have no social contact with him; he was not even allowed to eat with the family. Another 19-year-old traveled from Glasgow to Edinburgh where 4,000 members of the Close Brethren were being addressed by Mr. Taylor. Guards at the door turned him away because he had no pass, and his father was brought from the meeting to urge his son to “turn from your path of sin.” The sin in question was evidently the boy’s determination to meet the man who, he said, had caused his family to treat him as a stranger. A 73-year-old man reportedly had been compelled by the Exclusive Brethren to leave his wife after 37 years of happy married life. The distraught woman has been told that she is a sinner and that the home is “leprous.” In southwest Scotland her doctor warmly supported a woman’s plea that the local town council allocate a separate house for herself and her two sons, because the father’s association with the sect made their existence “a living hell.” Some 200 miles away another woman testified how family life had suddenly changed after her husband joined the group. She was quoted as saying: “The sect have tightened up some of their rules recently after word came from America. The leader is a Mr. Taylor and I often think I would like to meet this man to tell him that he is ruining our marriage. My husband attended a meeting in Aberdeen recently and when he came home he told me that he could no longer eat at the same table as nonbelievers … He has told my eldest boy that when he is 12 he will have to join the Brethren or eat at another time.… Another young man was ordered out of the family home, and when they meet now in the course of everyday business the father is as coldly polite as he would be to any casual acquaintance. Under the new regime many members of the sect have withdrawn from business and professional associations, and some have even declined to accept the university degree for which their academic success has qualified them.

One minister who has had some dealings with members of the group unclerically described their attitude thus:

We are the chosen few,

All others will be damned;

There is no place up there for you,

We can’t have heaven crammed.

It should be made clear that the particular conduct listed above reflects the policy of only one party of Exclusive Brethren. It is much to be regretted that undiscerning or malicious individuals have gone so far as to identify such attitudes even with the Open Brethren, a body which freely cooperates with evangelicals of other traditions (giving notable support in the Graham crusades at Harringay and Glasgow), and generally enriches the Christian life and witness of Britain to an extent out of all proportion to their comparatively modest numbers.

J. D. D.