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In this initial issue of a new decade, CHRISTIANITY TODAY presents thoughts of fourteen young evangelicals. They speak—sometimes in strident tones—to the great issues that face the Church in the seventies. Their views are important for younger as well as older readers who are concerned that Christian options gain greater visibility in the cultural crisis.

Mass Evangelism

Tom Skinner, 27, is an evangelist with an international reputation. He attended Manhattan Bible Institute and Wagner College and is an ordained Baptist clergyman. He has conducted evangelistic crusades in a number of large American cities and is heard throughout the country on a weekly radio broadcast. He was one of the major speakers at the U. S. Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis last September. He is the author of “Black and Free.”

An article in the Wall Street Journal last November stated that we can expect more changes in business, politics, and economics in the next five years than took place in all of the last twenty. If this is true, and I believe it is, then the Christian Church is faced with an immense challenge as it prepares to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the seventies.

1. Education. Education will change its emphasis from the study of history to creative preparation for the future. The message of Jesus Christ then must be preached in that vein.

2. Population. A majority of the population will be under twenty-five years of age. This means the Gospel of Christ must be preached in the language of that age group and in a way relevant to its life-style.

3. Black power. Black power will be a reality; many of the large cities will be controlled by a very highly trained, articulate, aggressive black constituency. If the message of Jesus Christ does not penetrate the black communities of America now, our cities will be lost then. The average age of black people in the 1970s will be twenty-one.

4. The Church. The Church will have to be less organization-oriented and more people-oriented if it is going to fulfill its task of reaching people in the 1970s.

I believe that we have the resources to do the job; but we need to change some basic attitudes and pattern our approach more after the New Testament.

The Preached Word

The Rev. Peter J. Marshall, 29, is pastor of East Dennis (Massachusetts) Community Church. He holds the B.A. from Yale University and the B.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the son of the late chaplain of the U. S. Senate.

Some people doubt seriously whether the sermon is still a legitimate method of communication in our fastchanging world. There are those who feel that the sermon belongs to the bygone days of leisurely Sunday dinners, afternoon snoozes, and long strolls in the countryside—the halcyon days when a particularly stirring offering from the pulpit might bring a basket of eggs to the back door of the parsonage. For many of these ecclesiastical “moderns,” the sermon has been relegated to the attic of life, along with grandfather’s old Bible commentaries.

I would like to gently remind these people that the sermon has never been more popular—nor, I might add, more effective as a means of communication—than it is today. The orators for the new left can certainly draw good crowds and get definite responses from their preaching, too!

Let us not excuse our own failure with the lament that this age cares nothing for biblical preaching—that claim is given the lie in hundreds of churches throughout America every Sunday. Let us rather look to ourselves to see if perhaps the failure is in our preaching, and ultimately within our own hearts. I do not think the answer lies in better seminary courses on preaching. The trouble often is due to a lack of personal enthusiasm about the Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel. Even an inarticulate man can be an exciting preacher, if his own heart is on fire with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Sermons are always going to be of importance to those experiencing (or wishing to experience) life in the true Body of Christ. First of all, the Lord Jesus Christ himself “came preaching the Gospel.” He chose preaching as an effective means of communicating his Gospel, and we cannot beg the issue by contending that preaching was the cultural norm of his day for itinerant rabbis. Maybe it was, but the son of God was not culturally bound to preaching as a method any more than he was bound to healing by the use of the medicinal herbs of his days. Yet he preached.

Secondly, Jesus Christ chose men to go out and preach sermons to the whole world. This was, and still is, one of the main ways in which the Gospel is to be spread—the apostolic preaching of the early Church was instigated and carried out by rather obvious divine guidance. Our Lord has said: “As the Father sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” That “as” applies to methods also, and Jesus “came into the world preaching.”

But why should Christ use men to preach? Because the truth must come through human personality if it is to interest humans. God’s truth is always communicated best through the warmth and vitality of the human voice coming from a person who is present to be seen face to face. Long ago, the Word became flesh. He still seeks to do so, again and again. Preaching will not die.

Foreign Missions

Howard L. Biddulph, 26, is under appointment for missionary service to Colombia under the Oriental (Inter-american) Missionary Society. He was reared as a missionary child in Medellin, Colombia, and holds the A.B. from Asbury College and the M.Div. from Asbury Theological Seminary. He is currently associate pastor of the Central Alliance Church, Dearborn, Michigan.

The dawn of the new decade is exciting for missionary enterprise. Missionary strategy has felt the impact of the studies on church growth. Seminary extension education has discovered ways to train large segments of church leadership that until recently had been neglected. Saturation evangelism has demonstrated the potential of a church mobilized for witness.

In the midst of optimism, however, some serious questions must be posed. Will missions of the seventies establish a healthy relationship with the national church? Or will historical paternalistic patterns prevail? The watchword of evangelical efforts overseas has been the “indigenous” church. But even a self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating national church can remain stalemated under the heavy-handed, insensitive influence of the founding missionary organization.

The new decade calls for church-mission integration: national representation at every level of decision—whether involving policies, funds, or personnel assignment. For the most effective performance of his task, the missionary must shift to the “partner-servant” role. In the first century, the Holy Spirit operated through persecution in radically changing the pattern of missionary outreach. Rising nationalism may prove to be his tool in forcing a change in the paternalism of modern evangelical missions.

Will missions of the seventies place a high enough priority on spiritual qualifications of the missionary? In recent years, more and more emphasis has been placed on the techniques and methods of mission. But beware of losing sight of the truth: God’s method is men. The best educated and fully dedicated, he fills with His Spirit as the enduement for service. Without this spiritual enduement, all the human qualifications do not and cannot make a missionary.

Missions of the seventies will prosper as their programs are subject to the guidance of the national church. Missionaries will prosper as their methods are subservient to the Spirit of God.

Theology

The Rev. John M. Frame, 30, was Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton University and has completed doctoral work at Yale. He is an instructor in systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.

I do not see a new Barth on the theological horizon; the seventies will not be dominated by any single figure. But neither will they witness another bewildering array of theological fads (“new hermeneutics,” “radical theologies,” “process theologies,” “history-theologies,” “hope-theologies”) like that which we desperately tried (or pretended) to keep abreast of in the sixties. Theologians are just plain tired of all this, and they are not at all sanguine about discovering “the key to Christianity” in some new scheme. To be sure, they will still talk about “language-events,” “existential self-understanding,” “Heilsgeschichte,” “dialectical self-negation,” “universal history,” “hope,”—even “encounter” and “crisis.” But they will discuss such concepts with less of a party spirit and more careful analysis. There will be more “metaquestions” asked: questions about questions; questions about theological language, argument, structure; questions about the meaning, function, and value of such conceptual schemes as those noted above. For such questions the techniques of analytic philosophy will be indispensable, and the theologians will have to quit talking so much about “analysis” and learn how to do it. As they thus move from a frenzied activism to a quieter self-examination, I suspect they will discover that Christianity is richer—more multi-centered—than most recent theologies of this and that have even hinted. They may even find that there are “keys” to Christianity other than those obtainable through conceptual sophistication.

This development will significantly advance the decay of that synthesis of Kantian philosophy and Christianity that has supplied the presuppositions of all the fashionable theologies of the last century and a half. Theologians of the seventies will be more prepared than ever before to challenge this synthesis at a basic level. But what will replace it? A new synthesis of the Gospel and a secular philosophy? Or (as in similar periods of ideological decay in the fourth and sixteenth centuries) might the orthodox perhaps seize the theological initiative?

Indeed we could, by God’s grace. But to do so, we must, like Athanasius and Luther, (1) recognize keenly the sharpness of the distinction between the Word of God and human theological traditions, (2) resist adamantly any temptation to compromise the former in the interest of the latter—even if such compromise appears to make the Gospel more “relevant” to our age, (3) develop gifts of knowledge and love so that we can speak to nonevangelical theologians, especially those who are themselves asking basic questions, and yet (4) be willing to endure the scorn of the theological mainstream if we must, determined to obey God’s Word even when it separates us from the sphere of the respectable—especially then, for this is always the direction of genuine advance. For these reasons and for many others, the courageousness of our commitment will determine the impact of our theology.

Physical Science

Carl Reidel, 32, holds a master’s degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is assistant director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College. He is a member of the First Baptist Church in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

God commanded man in Eden to “be fruitful and fill the earth and subdue it.” In seeking the good life east of Eden we have subdued the earth in selfishness and ignorance, endangering the quality of life for all mankind. Our excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides and the careless discharge of home and industrial wastes have polluted land and air, fresh waters and oceans. In the name of progress we have ravaged the land with erosion, urban sprawl, and highways. Unchecked world population has reached the point of sure starvation for millions in this decade. We have subdued the earth east of Eden and stand on the brink of a global environmental crisis in 1970. The Christian, as steward of God’s creation, cannot escape responsibility.

Ecology—the study of the interrelationships of living organisms and their environments—tells us that Nature is a community to which man belongs, linked to all of creation by the complex web of life in our natural environment. Man, however, is capable of altering his relationship in that community, and with his scientific technology is threatening the balance and function of fundamental natural systems. In so doing, ecology clearly indicates, he affects the lives of men everywhere. As God’s stewards we are our brother’s keeper. With this understanding we do well as Christians to heed our Lord’s warning that “as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

A Christian environmental ethic must, however, be more than a humanitarian response. Neither ecologist nor poet can interpret all of nature in terms of man’s physical or aesthetic benefit. We are stewards of all God’s creation, not just that portion from which we can benefit. In response to the depth of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ, our love of his creation should have no bounds. An environmental ethic based on Christian stewardship requires an extension of love to all of nature.

Church And Society

Howard M. Moffett, 26, is currently an aide to U. S. Congressman John B. Anderson. Moffett holds the B.A. from Yale and the M.A. from Cambridge University, and served as a Newsweek correspondent in Viet Nam. He is the son of Dr. Howard F. Moffett, superintendent of Presbyterian Hospital, Taegu, Korea.

Political pundits are fond of saying that President Nixon’s two greatest problems are the Viet Nam war and inflation. Conventional wisdom has it that if he can settle these, he will be re-elected in 1972 and the nation can settle down to another four years of relatively peaceful Republican rule. I believe that our political problems are deeper and vaguer than this, and that Mr. Nixon may end up presiding over the disintegration of our society if he does not address himself to two other serious problems.

The first is that individuals are finding less and less meaning in our corporate life. The central institutions of our society, the organizations that dominate our waking hours—the corporations, the universities, the government, the news and entertainment media, the armed services—are now so big and impersonal that individuals feel less and less able to have any impact on them or within them. No matter what we do, they seem to carry us mindlessly in a direction that is rapidly becoming impossible to identify, much less control. For personal meaning and satisfaction we are forced to look outside these central institutions—to leisure, family, and spiritual pursuits, which as we ask more of them are less able to bear the whole burden. At the core of our life together, apathy threatens to bring on a winter of the soul.

Our second great problem is the sense of impotence we are coming to feel in the face of mounting social and environmental threats to this most affluent, most effluent of nations. The Viet Nam war and inflation are long-standing and serious, but even they seem more tractable to us now than the pollution, violence, urban disintegration, moral decay, and racial hatreds that inflame our middle-class fears as they tax our middle-class consciences. We are poisoning our streams with filth and our hearts with hate, all with the oblivious ease of children who do not understand that poison kills. To the apathy brought on by the impersonalization of our institutions, we add malaise over a shrinking ability to cope with our deteriorating social and physical environment.

I see no panaceas for these problems—Christian or otherwise. I believe that one of the most serious sins of the Church has been to suggest that to convert our society would be to save it. The evidence is to the contrary in many cases, most notably that of race relations, where the monumental indifference and hypocrisy of many churches has added to the problem rather than helping to solve it. I can offer no easy answers, only the thought that these problems will be with us a long time, and that it is worth putting some of our most committed and enlightened thought into dealing with them.

Philosophy

Merold Westphal, 29, is assistant professor of philosophy at Yale, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. He is a member of the Community Baptist Church of New Haven.

During the seventies Christian philosophers will continue to employ theologically neutral methods in the exploration of technical issues whose relation to faith is at best remote. But they will also continue, as always, to address those philosophical issues that open themselves to distinctively Christian development.

What is new is the explosive situation which defines the philosophical present, and which philosophy can ignore only by being untrue to itself. The new challenge is for philosophy that can serve as prolegomena to living in a rapidly changing national and international society. In short, the task is the development within evangelical perspectives of a contemporary Christian humanism. For example, the problem of appearance and reality needs to be explored in relation to the drug scene and the rising attraction of Eastern thought. And the debate over universals needs to be reopened in light of the inhuman distortions that collectivism and individualism impose on so much contemporary experience.

There also needs to be a continuing concern with the traditionally primary task of Christian philosophy, prolegomena to theological systems. But these prolegomena dare not be merely apologetics for old and familiar styles and systems of theology. They need rather to be the stimulus to genuinely new evangelical theologies, as new as Luther’s was in his day. As handmaiden-gadfly to these new theologies, Christian philosophy needs to develop a biblical ontology, an eschatological ontology of reality as history. Such an ontology would seek to develop the categorial scheme that gives form to theology from the biblical content it seeks to articulate.

Finally, and above all, evangelicals in philosophy need to break free of the Cabot-Lodge syndrome, of speaking only to themselves and to God.

Medicine

William C. Wood, M.D., 29, is a clinical associate at the National Institutes of Health. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and Harvard Medical School. He is a member of Wallace Memorial United Presbyterian Church in Hyattsville, Maryland.

The cornucopia of medical science faces a worsening bottleneck, and delivering the fruits of research from the laboratory to the sickbed has become of prime concern. The next decade will see a doubled volume of all the medical information previously amassed in man’s history. Attempts to utilize this information in treatment will require increasing sub-specialization, a greatly expanded role for para-medical personnel, and the use of data-processing methods for mass screening and diagnostic procedures. This will demand increasing organization and institutionalization of health-care delivery with attendant depersonalization of this care.

Although our society has come to consider medical care a right of all men, many barriers inhibit the fulfillment of this concept. Costs will continue to rise geometrically as nurses, hospital aides, resident physicians, and laboratory workers are allowed to approach the pay scales and work hours in industry and government for equivalent positions. The consumer (government, insurance companies, corporations, unions, and individual patients) will demand a greater voice in regulating costs and determining what quality of medical care society can afford to provide.

Financial considerations will be overshadowed by matters of supply and demand. Medicine is decreasingly productive, as illustrated by the dozen or more physicians and surgeons, equal numbers of nurses, and innumerable laboratory tests required for an organ transplant or open-heart surgery. Minimal increases in training of personnel contrast sharply with the mushrooming demand for health care swelled by increasing medical sophistication of the lay public and overpopulation. The consequences of overpopulation on the provision of health care are beyond comprehension. The geographical barrier of maldistribution of health resources results in an excess of health care in certain areas balanced by a lack of care among great masses of the world’s population. And even in our own society educational and psycho-sociological hindrances to adequate care are manifold.

As research turns increasingly from mechanisms and treatment to causes of disease, we must focus on preventive medicine. It seems hypocritical to suggest to “underdeveloped” nations that they improve sanitation by moving their privies farther from their wells, when in America our industrial and urban offal is piped directly into our water and air. On the personal level, cigarette smoking, overeating, underexercise, alcoholic consumption, and driving habits are factors having a major bearing on our health.

Many moral problems will arise from the role of medical science in the generation, termination, and modification of life. This last involves the increasing use of psychotropic (mind-changing) drugs, which in ten years will probably be almost universal in our society, at least on an intermittent basis. These are largely tranquilizers or mood-elevating drugs. How much to be preferred is Christ’s offer of “peace, such as the world cannot give.”

Christian Education

Vicky Smith Hess, 27, received the B.A. and M.A. from Wheaton College. She has served as director of Christian education at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C., has taught at Washington Bible College, and served as dean of women there.

Education in the seventies will be an issue more of practice than of theory. Educators have long cried for individualized learning that starts where a pupil is and not where he should be. The challenge comes to understand people as well as subject matter and to equip these people for full and productive lives in a modern world. However, as this world becomes more complex, the achievement of a relevant education becomes more difficult.

The granting of a degree even now signifies obsolescence because of rapid mushrooming of knowledge. Education must become a continuing, lifelong process. College enrollments and adult-education programs will see astounding growth in the seventies. The further application of technology to learning promises increased efficiency.

Struggles are inevitable. Creative teachers attempting to meet needs in a non-traditional setting face the harsh reality of pupils whose homes have offered little training in discipline or structured learning. They see children receiving more and more freedom, not all of which they are able to handle responsibly. As protest spreads, schools will be pressed to offer constructive reform and to avoid convenient concessions. For example, the crisis in inner-city education demands answers in the next decade. The largest problems will be lack of money and of courageous, trained leaders to administer changes and to use funds wisely.

While public education faces a theory-practice gap, the Church finds itself in a similar predicament. Can it relate the vitality of the Gospel to an Apollo 12 world? The Church is pressed for viable answers. These answers won’t come from a new audio-visual method. They won’t come from those who are satisfied to perpetuate tradition or from those who are bound by stunned reaction to current trends. The Church in the seventies must agree to move in new and varied ways and to trust the veracity of the Gospel to win and change men.

Social Ethics

Paul B. Henry, 27, is completing doctoral work in political science at Duke University. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia and Ethiopia and is a member of Watts Street Baptist Church, Durham, North Carolina. He is the son of Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor-at-large ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

To say that there is a generation gap between the post-thirty establishment evangelicals and their pre-thirty offspring is not only to state the obvious but to border on understatement. The entire apologetic mentality of establishment evangelicalism is out of tune with the problems being faced by the under-thirty generation. While the establishment debates concepts of organic evolution with scholastic precision, we face the challenges of social revolution. While the establishment continues to split hairs as to how we are to be separate from the world, we wonder how we can become meaningfully involved. These current issues are as apologetically meaningful to the contemporary mind as were the older issues in generations past.

Twentieth-century evangelicalism has failed in the task of giving social and political expression to its commitment to Ghrist. Its own mentors have attested to “the uneasy conscience of modern fundamentalism.” Evangelicalism needs an awakened conscience that will no longer take lightly its de facto alliance with privileged interests and conservative socio-political forces. It must repent from its tendencies toward cold-blooded rationalism in the face of human need, and remember the compassion of Christ, who literally wept for the city of Jerusalem.

The under-thirty generation rejects the sectarian tendencies and the overly personalistic ethics of establishment evangelicalism. This highly individualistic temper within the evangelical community has made it functionally incapable of relating to the broadly based and interdependent social structures of contemporary society.

At the same time, the under-thirty generation does not totally repudiate all it has learned from its tradition. It realizes that the ultimate questions are not political, but spiritual. It realizes that man’s utopian quests are always frustrated by his nature as sinner. It realizes that it, too, shall be judged by its children, just as we are now casting judgment on our elders. Above all, it realizes that all mankind shall someday be judged by God himself, and that only then will the questions of history and the social order be resolved.

Military Life

Peter M. Smith, 22, is a 1969 graduate of the United States Naval Academy now on active duty with the Navy as an ensign. He is the product of a Presbyterian manse, the son ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY’SDirector of Development.

Traditionally the armed forces has not been an organization known for its religious leadership. Much of this can be attributed to the frequent lack of family life experienced by the career personnel. The family is the seat of religious conviction and practice, but the career serviceman can expect to spend nearly half his adult life away from this stronghold of Christianity. This forces the Christian to have a much more personal relationship with Christ in the midst of many who seem content without Him.

There is great pressure on the officers and enlisted men who live their job twenty-four hours daily. One wrong decision or even a slight hesitation may cost many lives and millions of dollars in equipment. To many, adding Christ to a myriad of minute details of which one must be readily knowledgeable is almost unthinkable.

The “squareness” of Christianity also seems to be magnified in the armed forces. The byword is conformity, and many find it difficult to decline to patronize local nightclubs, which offer such a change of pace from the rigorous daily routine.

There are no simple solutions to these problems, but credit must be given to the chaplains, who are daily showered with problems that seem unresolvable. It is mainly through these pillars of strength that the message of Christianity is initiated and nurtured. With the opportunity, many men renew their dedication and lead a changed life after this exposure to Christian leadership. This is shown by the tremendous impact made on the troops in Viet Nam by Dr. Billy Graham.

It seems to me the best vehicle for spreading the Gospel of Christianity is on the personal level where others learn through observation of, and discussion with, an active disciple.

The Arts

Kathleen Norell, 25, is an instructor of English at Prince George’s Community College, Largo, Maryland. She holds an M.A. from Loyola University and is a member of the Evangelical Free Church.

The arts, always a year or ten ahead of Madison Avenue and the institutions of our society, are already voicing the themes and concerns of the seventies.

The “Age of Aquarius,” that epoch of peace and community heralded by pop culture, is struggling to be actualized in the poetry, music, painting and life-style of artists who seek to transcend the conflicts and anxieties of the sixties through drugs.

The forces of a dehumanized, technological environment are being confronted and often reshaped in the experiences of “total” theater, junk sculpture, and “habitat” architecture.

The individual artist of the early sixties, speaking of his personal alienation through a private symbolism, now begins to search for the common voice. Racial and ethnic backgrounds form the basis of a shared vision for many; common social class or geographic region provide the same for many others. In the visual arts and literature, especially, the quest for identity begins to give way to assertion.

Sex-and-violence, almost a cliché in our culture, has moved far beyond mere tawdry exploitation, pervading the arts with an obsessive quest into the nature of man. Although movies and best-seller lists draw public attention, the walls of little galleries and the offerings of contemporary theaters reveal more profoundly a serious and intense search for freedom from guilt.

The arts in the seventies will present problems as old as man himself—but in the language and media of a space age that touches no finite boundaries and of a nuclear age whose boundaries are too well defined. The contradictions of man’s seemingly unlimited ability to conquer his environment through technology and research and his apparent inability to cope with uncontrolled population, poverty, war, and pollution will find vivid expression in the arts.

And these are the problems which the Christian artist and layman must confront. Will the Church, faced with the art of Afro-American solidarity or hippie commune, recognize the inherent value of all human attempts at community—and yet bear witness to the truth that wholeness centers in Christ? Will Christians take seriously the sometimes creative, sometimes destructive response of the junk sculptor to a mechanized environment, realizing that man needs to find God’s presence in this world? Will we condemn the serious explorations of human sexuality, even in its perversions, as malicious exploitation? Or will we, out of our own deep understanding of guilt and shame, respond with an art and interpretation that points to release?

The arts burn into our consciousness the realities of these changing times. The coming decade provides us another opportunity to express through them the Reality that does not change.

The Urban Problem

Ozzie L. Edwards, 33, is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. He holds the Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin.

Apart from some very radical change in the nature of man and in the nature of his modes of social and political organization, we can expect that the decade which has just begun will be marked by a persistence of patterns of urbanization and polarization of social groups, both of which have significant implications for the Christian Church. While urbanization is not a new trend, its rate has been greatly accelerated in recent years. In the half century between 1850 and 1900, the world population increased from 1,171,000,000 to 1,608,000,000. During this period the proportion of a population in cities of 100,000 or more increased from 2.3 per cent to 5.5 per cent. In the first half of the twentieth century, world population increased to 2,400,000,000 and the proportion in large cities increased to 13.1 per cent.

Social psychologists have observed that these large dense settlements produce persons possessed with a sense of isolation and powerlessness, persons whose life-style is marked by a rational, reserved, sophisticated approach. They are not readily converted to new positions. Lest a positive value be placed on this psychological predisposition, we hasten to note that the rates of suicide and mental illness are considerably higher in urban places. Moreover, a greater incidence of various forms of social deviance is found in the urban setting. Murder is one and one half times greater, burglary three times greater, and robbery twelve times greater in urban places. With an increase in urbanization of the population, we can expect an intensification of these problems.

While urbanization has involved a decrease in physical distance, it has been correlated with an increase in social distance. As we enter the seventies we find ourselves in a society characterized by cleavages of social groups. We find intense conflict between rich and poor, old and young, non-white and white. The urban setting proved to be the primary site for the joining of battles. Although some would classify these as “social issues,” more careful and honest evaluation reveals the basic underlying moral issues involved. Morality, right, and truth are the stuff of Christianity. We must not abdicate our responsibility to meet these challenges in the decade of the seventies.

Mass Media

Richard N. Ostling, 29, is religion reporter for “Time” magazine. He holds bachelor and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He is former news editor ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

As an American Indian demonstrator was reading a statement of protest at the U.S. Congress on Evangelism, a key official put his hand in front of a TV man’s camera. A few months earlier a lay leader in a big Northeast evangelical church argued with me that Time and most major media are infiltrated by the Communist party. So I suppose many evangelical “Amens” were muttered at Spiro Agnew’s attacks on TV news and the press.

Like Agnew, evangelicals often blend ignorance and distrust with the idea that comments shouldn’t oppose their own interests. This approach stifles the spirit of the Reformation, and now that evangelicals are a minority group they have a vital stake in free discussion. How many have read the great Puritan Milton in Areopagitica: “If it comes to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.” Those are words for the seventies.

While he was putting some important problems (well discussed by journalists) into a partisan context, Agnew was ignoring the greater problem. Our minds and culture have been trivialized by the TV cult of the sixties. Christianity and many other matters of weight have not been profitable enough to get into the limited prime time. If the 1970s bring cable TV, religion suddenly will have a crack at eighty-two channels in each home. Quantity of outlets is no cure-all, however. Evangelicals already have quantity in radio, but much of it is aimed at fellow evangelicals. Relatively few non-Christians listen in except in drunken derision. The print media in religion are also over-extended. Why not pool 300 Protestant publications into a dozen or so of real quality and variety? Maybe even those non-Christians will take interest.

Evangelicals, often trapped in the culture of Middle America, have special communications problems. They must strive for content first. They must learn to listen to outsiders so they can respond to them. Some favor puffery to candor. Others don’t care about public opinion at all. These foibles are getting dangerous, because communication of Christianity as a live option in the seventies depends greatly on evangelicals. The spiritual sap of tradition is not running in ecumenical Protestantism. Catholicism is preoccupied with inner turmoil. Eastern Orthodoxy is parochial.

One more facet of the seventies: Christianity has always depended on rational, verbal forms to communicate the Logos; now all the non-print media are becoming machine guns of image and emotion. In such an atmosphere, Christians will be in danger of divorcing heart from mind—always a strong temptation for evangelicals.

1969 And Welcome To It

Any day now my mailman will deliver the monthly magazine of a small regional denomination. Its leading article, the usual review of the year gone by, never varies in January. I could write it in advance: crime has increased; you can’t walk the streets at night in safety; the Man of Sin’s local lackey (“that so-called bishop”) continues his baneful influence in state government; insidious humanism is being purveyed from television and radio stations; the long-haired hordes have taken over the country’s education system; and people generally are harkening unto the voice of the charmer. Like its predecessors, 1969 was a dismal failure, best forgotten, twelve disastrous months in which sin was rampant, virtue unrewarded, and the warnings of a faithful remnant unheeded. A gloomy, rigid, legalistic commentary on that-was-the-year-that-was and good riddance to it. Forecast for tomorrow: rain all the way. Its treatment of the year makes me want to paraphrase Mark Twain: “There’s a lot to be said in its favor, but the other is more interesting.”

Yet the editor is a kindly man who has greeted me warmly on the two occasions we have met, despite my incriminating links. I’m sorry for him (he is probably sorry for me), and for all who are obliged to write to order. I have a delightful memory of one of that editor’s colleagues, far from home and watchdogs, telling seminarians to guard against inordinate preoccupation with bibliolatry. His illustration: “If the Bible says the bush burned, then the bush burned whether the bush burned or not.”

But to return to that magazine. I wondered what it needed to balance its not wholly unjustified Weltanschauung, and decided that a capacity for saying thank you would not be out of place. 1 wish, for example, they could have printed a letter from one of my oldest friends, both of whose parents died in quick succession. With an obscure form of cerebral palsy that denies him control over shaking limbs, makes speech indistinct, and confines him to a wheelchair for life, he has an alert mind that devised an instrument (made to his instructions) to attach to his slightly less affected foot, allowing him to type. Speed: one line in twenty-five breathless jerking minutes.

Enclosing a poem he wrote for “The Day of Grace” (Christmas), he says: “God has been kind to me, and I know He will always be with me. I offer thanks for those blessings He gives to each one of us.”

Well, 1969 maybe wasn’t so black after all. I don’t know how long he took to compose the poem, but just typing it and the letter meant eight hours of his life. I wish my day’s work produced such a powerful sermon.

EUTYCHUS IV

Fast Relief

I agree with the philosophy in “’Tis the Season to Be Gluttonous” (Nov. 21). If every Christian American would start a “fasting fund” by putting aside the money he would have spent on some unnecessary snack, relief agencies like ours would not have to work so hard to raise funds so we can put a little meat on the bones of some of the “tiny skeletons.”

If this idea caught on, particularly among idealistic youth, they would do something about it, I’m sure. We recently received a $200 check from Montana Evangelical Youth, the proceeds from a “sacrifice banquet” which they initiated at the annual convention of The Evangelical Church of North America, held recently in Billings, Montana. Bread sticks and thin rice soup took the place of the annual roast beef banquet, and the young people sent their “fasting fund” to us to help feed starving children.

EVERETT S. GRAFFAM

Executive Vice-President

World Relief Commission

King of Prussia, Pa.

Conking Out On Death

Thomas Howard certainly has a nice writing style, impressive educational credentials, a certain amount of fame. But methinks he conks out when it comes to the theological implications of Christ’s death (“The Human Experience of Death,” Nov. 21). While it is true that physical death was an enemy met and overcome by our Lord, it is not true that physical death was the basis for the great anguish evidenced by his scream of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” His cry of anguish came as God the Father laid on him the sins and iniquities of us all. Thus to build so much of his article around the death of Christ brings only confusion. We, as believers, will never have that experience to go through. Ours will be purely the participation in the battle with death, not the bearing the weight of sin.…

I did appreciate Mr. Howard’s line of thought that death is one of the common experiences of life, held by all. And yes it is a part of being transformed into the image of Christ. And yes it is a real enemy. But the battle is also fought by our Lord.

Cloverdale, Ore.

LEON WALLACE

A Withering Policy

After reading your editorial, “The President’s Viet Nam Policy” (Nov. 21), I am convinced that political observation is not your specialty. You begin by saying, “President Nixon’s long awaited speech on November 3 broke no new ground, offered no new substantive changes of policy, and probably did little if anything to alter public opinion.”

Until President Nixon put forth the policy of gradual withdrawal of forces from Viet Nam and the Vietnamization of the war, there were only two alternatives prominently discussed, either to stay in or get out, either of which would encourage the enemy to continue the war. The first would be used to divide us at home, the second would give them a military objective. No wonder we could see no end in sight of the war.

The Nixon genius not only denies the enemy both of these advantages, but it would uniquely and wisely deny the Communists the opportunity to work the negotiations racket on us in a Viet Nam settlement. This, we contend, is a substantive change of policy and will probably see this war wither on the vine within a year. No wonder the new left came wailing out in “moratorium” anguish.

The fact that public opinion was altered dramatically, probably more than by any other single speech in history, is demonstrated by an unprecedented jump in opinion backing the President in his Viet Nam policy from a reported 65 per cent to 78.2 per cent within the space of a two weeks’ sampling.

It should be mentioned, too, that President Nixon’s challenge, bringing out the “silent majority” in such amazing force, probably altered some Communist opinion too about a seriously divided America. JAMES E. HANSON Evangelical Presbyterian Church Bellingham, Wash.

Nobody knows if his plan is right or not, but we must go along, and if he is wrong, he will be responsible and we can register our dissatisfaction at the polls. Yes, but it is the young American boy who must take all the risk when the political statesman is right or wrong; for the politician it is only the office he may lose, while the youth may lose his life. The young man under twenty-one has no other place to protest than in the street; he cannot vote for three years after he has been eligible for the draft. While we wait for the next election three years from now, another 90,000 American boys may be killed—plus all the other humans, no matter what name they bear. I don’t think we can wait that long to end an immoral war where we are twisting even the morals of the youth who are fighting it, when even the American soldiers are alleged to kill a whole village of people—women and children who plead for their lives. Instead of making men out of the boys in the military, we are making murderers out of them.

WALTER A. STEEN

Covenant Church

Floral Park, N. Y.

Twinkle, Twinkle

Janet Rohler’s “What’s the Mutter with Astrology?” (Nov. 21) prompts me to point out a fact the astrologers never emphasize to their clients and admirers.

Astrology is inextricably interwoven with reincarnation, both deriving from that fount of Eastern occultism that extends back to prehistoric civilizations. A basic tenet of reincarnation is that souls, through thousands of successive lives, struggle to shed their egocentricity and worldly concerns.

The outstanding mark of the perfected Eastern mystic is his freedom from all influences of the stars, freedom from this “wheel of life.” For the stars are said to affect only the worldly, egocentric nature of man. His spiritual nature is God-centered and therefore free from astrological influences.

This astrological reincarnation process of “salvation” is said to take eons to accomplish. But faith in Jesus Christ, we know, brings the same salvation in a matter of seconds, the same freedom from the “wheel of life”! Therefore the question of the validity of astrology is purely academic—who needs it?

WILLIAM R. PALMER

Monmouth Junction, N. J.

Stirring Body

“John Brown’s Student Body” (News, Nov. 21) has filled me with dismay, for it appears that it can only be described as unfriendly. This news item is substantially in error in matters of readily verifiable fact, and I must face the question: How many of your other articles and news items are similarly inadequately researched and are perhaps in error? Surely you must be concerned that such an apprehension may hang like a cloud whenever your magazine is read!

ROGER F. COX

Dean of Academic Affairs

John Brown University

Siloam Springs, Ark.

To think any college which calls itself Christian would, by “a faculty-dominated committee,” not allow “neatly clipped” mustaches and beards to be worn by its students! Is it possible to find anywhere a more vicious example of un-Christian legalism?

But, almost infinitely more important, the school is in a town where local law dictates that “Negroes must leave town by 5 P.M.”! Has any member of the faculty or student body any Christian commitment at all? How much longer (“The Arkansas school is marking its fiftieth anniversary this year”) will it be until the “Christian” students and faculty members rise up in holy wrath and make a really gut protest at the local level until such an un-Christian and vicious law be removed from the community?

DONALD K. BLACKIE

The Collegiate Church

Des Moines, Iowa

Please be advised that Siloam Springs, Arkansas, does not now, nor has it ever had an ordinance to the effect that Negroes must leave town by 5:00 P.M., nor is there any ordinance pertaining to this subject.

NEAL LANCASTER

City Clerk-Treasurer

Siloam Springs, Ark.

I am a student at John Brown University.… It has been discovered that a JBU student wrote the article even though he was not identified in the article. This student made a mistake, I feel, in analyzing student reaction to a speech made by Senator Mark Hatfield who spoke here on October 25. Senator Hatfield received a standing ovation after his speech not necessarily because the majority of the student body agreed with his views or because he gave a great speech. He received a standing ovation out of courtesy to Dr. John Brown, president of JBU, who stood up first. The standing ovation was definitely not spontaneous.

BRUCE W. CLARK

Siloam Springs, Ark.

I hardly think that the student body of JBU can be considered a “prototype of Southern religious-political conservatism” … because the student body is a cosmopolitan one coming from almost all of the fifty states and a few foreign countries. As a matter of fact, for the past decade, at least, the majority of the students have come from California, the Midwest, and the North Atlantic states.…

That Hatfield received a standing ovation means comparatively nothing any more at JBU. This is not to downgrade the Senator; the JBU student body has handed out “standing ovations” like silverware at the dining hall. And I might add they were quite frequently led by Mr. John Terry—who in my opinion can hardly be accepted as a spokesman for the student body or the faculty.…

I say these comments as a person who loves his alma mater and deeply appreciated the training I received there.… I do feel that JBU and campuses like it need our prayers in the face of the neo-evangelical trend facing America as well as, it appears, does Mr. Hatfield need our prayers.

Warsaw, Ind.

KEITH MEGILLIGAN

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Of all the New Testament doctrines mythologized by neo-Protestant theologians, none has fared worse than justification by faith.

One ploy of recent modern theology has been a constant appeal to the majestic Reformation principle of sole fidei in an attempt to divorce Christian belief both from the certainty of objectively revealed truths (in the inspired prophetic-apostolic Scriptures) and from any firm grounding in external historical events (particularly the substitutionary atonement and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ).

To be sure, the Bible’s rejection of salvation by human effort rules out man’s ability to relate himself acceptably to the Living God by the genius of the human mind no less than by the energies of the will and emotions. God’s thoughts and God’s ways are higher than man’s—higher still than sinful man’s, who cannot achieve divine acceptance whether by intellectual ingenuity or by moral striving.

But the lifeline of the Protestant Reformation was its rediscovery of the Scripture truth that God offers to penitent believers, hopelessly guilty in their strivings to achieve salvation by works, the benefits of Jesus Christ’s mediation on the Cross. God acquits sinners, solely on the ground of a righteousness that he himself provides, a righteousness made known by intelligible divine revelation and embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a righteousness available to sinful men by faith alone.

But modern theologians have extended the Protestant principle of soteriological justification into a perverse speculative theory of epistemological justification by skepticism. Many neo-Protestant writers contend that the religious-ethical principle of justification solely by faith must be expanded to include a religious-intellectual corollary. In deference to divine revelation, man not only must renounce speculative rationalism, but supposedly must also repudiate all cognitive knowledge about God in order to give faith the right of way. Some recent statements consequently expound justification by faith in a manner that would destroy both the indispensable historical content and the indispensable knowledge content of revealed religion. “Justification by faith” becomes an abstract speculative principle through which its neo-Protestant advocates undermine much, if not all, that the New Testament and the Protestant Reformers considered essential to their exposition of the doctrine.

According to the contemporary view, intellectual faith-justification requires the rejection of any claim to divinely revealed truths, to the historical factuality of saving events, and to the scientific credibility of biblical miracles. Faith that justifies, it is said, has nothing to do with revealed information and external events: it is essentially trust in God devoid of cognitive knowledge.

That faith should liberate man’s conscience, rather than burden it, was indeed one of Luther’s emphases. But to turn this freedom into a theological necessity for emptying Christian belief of revelational truths and of the historical actuality of redemptive events is to misappropriate and pervert a Reformation principle.

Yet almost every influential neo-Protestant theologian in the recent past—including Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, F. Gogarten, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and the Niebuhrs—has wrongly used “justification by faith alone” to discount or dismiss the cognitive content and historical foundations of Christian faith. Some have done worse than others: they have turned justification by faith into an apology for non-Christian theology while at the same time evaporating the great distinctives of biblical religion. Some statements virtually reduce faith to courageous ignorance.

The early Barth contended that God confronts man and precipitates spiritual crisis by exposing the ambiguity of man’s religious life. Barth insisted, however, that divine revelation does not convey truths and that faith is a “not-knowing” (The Epistle to the Romans, London: Oxford University, 1933, p. 88). His later attempts to rescue an intellectual or cognitive significance for faith came too late and were, in any case, too halting. Barth’s early emphasis on a cognitively contentless revelation was nonetheless coordinated with God’s exclusive revelation in Jesus Christ; later theologians, traveling the same route of “not-knowing” faith, freed divine disclosure from a necessary connection with Jesus Christ.

Every one of the dialectical and/or existential theologians insists that any and all religious truth-claims are ambiguous; existentialism’s repudiation of every attempt to speak objectively of God was, therefore, destined for special welcome. Revelation is regarded, not as an objective divine communication of truths about God and his purposes, but rather as internal and paradoxical spiritual encounter. Revelation, in this view, has for its correlate not knowledge but trust; justification by faith, in consequence, is correlated with intellectual doubt.

Bultmann considers his whole demythological projection of faith and understanding wholly “parallel to St. Paul’s and Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone.… Or rather, it carries this doctrine to its logical conclusion in the field of epistemology” (in Kerygma and Myth, ed. by Hans Werner Bartsch, Harper, 1961, pp. 210 f.). Insists Bultmann: “Indeed, de-mythologizing is the radical application of the doctrine of justification by faith to the sphere of knowledge and thought.… There is no difference between security based on good works and security built on objectifying knowledge” (Jesus Christ and Mythology, Scribner, 1958, p. 84). Faith is correlated with the word alone, but this word of proclamation has no basis in revealed truths or historical saving events, inasmuch as the modern world-view is assumed to have ruled out the supernatural. The act of God in the Christ-event, however, that meets man in the preached word, enables man in faith to experience authentic life.

After first whittling down Paul’s entire Christology to justification by faith, Bultmann then reinterprets the latter to mean that man can experience “new life” by forgoing all self-justifying effort—a category in which Bultmann includes any confidence in divinely disclosed truths. The authority and evidential value of the prophetic-apostolic writings is excluded as a support for faith, since to buttress belief objectively would contribute to self-justification by obscuring the possibility of a new mode of existence in terms of radical faith. If authentic existence is defined as existential self-understanding, then assurance that rests on externally valid beliefs and objective factors must belong to inauthentic existence. Bultmann welcomes negative historical criticism for the support it gives to his theological slant. The assaults of a naturalistic philosophy of science and of historical positivism upon external miracles in nature and history enjoy free course. Reformation theology cannot base faith upon any “work,” and in this category Bultmann includes any fruit of historical and scientific inquiry. Faith must rest, instead, solely upon the preached word (though it is unclear why this, too, cannot be critically viewed as in some sense also a “work”). Bultmann concentrates the entire reality of revelation upon the event of preaching. Theological propositions are true only as existential statements, and only through faith is God knowable (which is Bultmannian shorthand for authentic self-understanding).

“Faith alone” here means existential decision without dependence on supernatural supports, historical happenings, cognitive content, or external evidence. Unlike Barth, who maintained the necessity of Jesus Christ’s substitutionary death and external resurrection, Bultmann retains the supernatural and miraculous only as myth and not as objective reality. For Bultmann, the essence of justification by faith is trust in God’s act experienced in existential response to the preached word in the absence of objective knowledge and external considerations.

But if Bultmann insists nonetheless on the reality of God apart from our faith, while denying God’s knowability outside faith, H. Braun radicalizes Bultmann’s existentialism to the point where the existence of God is wholly identical with the self-understanding of man in faith. Braun reduces the New Testament doctrine of justification by faith to the ethical tension of “I ought” and “I may.” The apostles sound forth Jesus’ call to moral transformation in terms of the paradoxical unity of God’s radical demand and radical grace. By first understanding and proclaiming the faith that unites God’s demand with his grace and hence justifies, Jesus provided historical impetus for justification. But Braun holds that justification can be verified elsewhere in human experience. Anthropology, according to Braun, is the New Testament constant, and Christology the variable. Despite his dismissal of the independent reality of God, and despite the dispensability in principle of Jesus of Nazareth (the moral paradox at the heart of the doctrine of justification might, in theory, have been uncovered by another person remarkably dissimilar to the Man of Galilee), Braun nonetheless espouses justification by faith, however deviantly.

Since faith is presumably independent of conceptual knowledge and of historical events, F. Gogarten ventures a restatement of justification that makes possible both the complete and radical autonomy of the physical and historical sciences and man’s total reliance upon them in shaping the future (see The Reality of Faith, Westminster, 1959, chap. 10). Justification by faith is, therefore, not related to man’s individual moral and spiritual predicament before God; instead, it sanctions man’s shaping of the world and of history by reason and science alone, rather than their forfeiture to religious incredulity. Gogarten misappropriates Luther’s great doctrine to advance his own connection of faith with secularization as a Christian phenomenon; for him, the revelation of Jesus Christ is the direct and original basis of secularization. Jesus’ unreserved trust in the Father fully exposes the fact that the cosmos and history, contrary to the prevalent pagan beliefs, are not controlled by divinatory powers. As son of the Father, and in view of his confidence in the Creator, man is now wholly free to become lord of the world—so Gogarten contends—through unlimited use of reason and science.

In other words, the secularization of society assertedly has a divine mandate; man can fulfill his responsibility in the world only by aggressive reliance on reason alone rather than on faith; the limitless use of reason and science are the means by which man must advance the order, unity, coherence, and future of the world. But, says Gogarten, only faith in God as Creator frees man for this total reliance on reason. Man’s understanding of the world as God’s creation is, therefore, the equivalent of man’s justification in God’s sight. In this way the doctrine of justification, forcibly detached from the whole framework of supernatural revelation and miraculous redemption, gains speculative exposition in terms of man’s freedom to enlist science to fulfill his culture-mandate in the world and history.

In America it was Tillich who carried the modern distortion of justification by faith to its extreme. Repeatedly Tillich claimed the Pauline and Lutheran doctrine of justification as the foundation of his entire theological outlook. The essence of that doctrine, he insisted, is as indispensable today as in the first and sixteenth centuries. But, as he went on to say, a reinterpretation and wholly new understanding of it are necessary: “This idea is strange to the man of today and even to Protestant people in the churches” and is now “scarcely understandable even to our most intelligent scholars.… And we should not imagine that it will be possible in some simple fashion to leap over this gulf and resume our connection with the Reformation again” (The Protestant Era, University of Chicago, 1948, p. 196).

Tillich proposes to revive and reinterpret justification by faith not merely as an article of the creed but also, by relating man to God as the Ground of all being, as the comprehensive frame through which ultimate reality is to gain new power in universal human life. Tillich’s radically conceived view detaches justification by faith from its historical understanding—namely, from the doctrinal biblical view of God, of Christ, of redemption—and boldly turns it into a formula for repudiating supernatural theism.

In view of man’s inability to protect himself, by human striving, against devastating threats to survival and existence, Tillich expounds the implications of justification by faith for cultural autonomy. Neither right beliefs nor spiritual activity nor any other achievement on man’s part, he says, can stave off the ultimate condemnation of man’s efforts to failure. But justification means that man is accepted as he is, without even striving for acceptance; it declares that grace is available, and that man’s estrangement from God is overcome in reconciliation and new being.

To see in such a presentation the New Testament content of justification by faith is to misunderstand Tillich. He calls man to no particular beliefs, to no intellectual presuppositions whatever, to no specific spiritual affirmations—not even to the definition of acknowledgement of divine grace, nor to the naming of God’s Name. According to Tillich, the Protestant principle assertedly implies that “there cannot be a truth in human minds which is divine truth itself. Consequently, the prophetic spirit must always criticize, attack, and condemn sacred authorities, doctrines and morals” (The Protestant Era, p. 226). Protestantism must proclaim the judgment that brings assurance by depriving us of all security and must proclaim our having truth in the very absence of truth (even of religious truth). “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.… Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” (The Shaking of the Foundations, Scribner, 1948, p. 162). Hence, in his application of justification by faith to the religious aspect of man’s ethical life, Tillich divorces divine acceptance of man from specific doctrinal beliefs.

He goes still futher by applying the justification theory to the whole intellectual side of religion in such a way that the skeptic is no less divinely justifiable than the striver who merely believes himself to be accepted. Doubt is said to unfold within itself an infinite passion for the truth, a faith is assertedly hidden inside skepticism. If justifying faith involves no specific content, the skeptic who has hidden faith must also be regarded as somehow in the truth and in unity with Being itself. “The paradox got hold of me,” said Tillich, “that he who seriously denies God, affirms him” (The Protestant Era, p. xv). So then justification by faith is universally assured, even to those who find belief in God an impossibility. On Tillich’s premises “there is no possible atheism”: God is present in every act of faith, even if this faith expressly denies the very existence of God. If correct ideas are a dispensable “work” in relation to justification by faith, then neither incorrect ideas nor ideas in suspense or doubt can disqualify one from justification by faith—just so long as one is earnestly involved. “Go with Pilate, if you cannot go with Jesus; but go in seriousness with him!” writes Tillich of Pilate’s doubts concerning the truth (The New Being, p. 68).

This is not all. Tillich gives an even more radical, more universal, more abstract statement of justification by faith. Not only for the skeptic, in whose doubt faith is said to be nonetheless present as a presupposition, but even for one committed to a-meaning, justification is possible without intellectual reversal. Heinz Zahrnt summarizes Tillich’s position as follows: “The courage which looks despair in the face already is faith, and the act of taking meaninglessness on oneself is a meaningful act” (The Question of God, London: Collins, 1969, p. 344).

In his closing chapter of The Courage to Be, written in 1952, Tillich suggests that the very term faith desperately needs modern reinterpretation, then proceeds to analyze the experience of courage, connecting, in the face of meaninglessness, the courage to be with the power of being, or the Ground of all being.

By affirming our being, we participate in the self-affirmation of being-itself. There are no valid arguments for the ‘existence’ of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not.… Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to meaning itself [The Courage to Be, Yale University, 1952, p. 181].

Tillich’s closing words are, “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” (p. 190). The experience, undirected, without specific content, that appeals to no special divine revelation but takes into itself doubt and meaninglessness in the bald confidence that one is accepted—this Tillich calls “absolute faith.” Its sole presupposition is the Ultimate, the God above God,” beyond describable identity. Absolute faith is faith without a theology, without words and concepts, yet is faith in the trans-personal presence of the Divine, the depth of things, the ultimate Ground.

For Tillich, in other words, there is no unconditional truth of faith except one, and that is, it would appear, that no one possesses any such truth. Despite this disclaimer, however, Tillich was somehow misled into believing justification in the Tillichian reinterpretation to be an indispensable truth, and this at the high cost of scuttling the biblical truth of the self-revealing God and the truth of justification by faith in the understanding of the Book of Romans and in the experience of the Reformers. In his exposition, justification gains a universal significance that goes beyond Protestantism, beyond Catholicism, beyond Christianity itself. Tillich’s concept loses both the God of the Bible and the supernatural redemption and rescue of sinful man. In short, by elaborating justification as a speculative principle the way he does, Tillich forfeits justification as a supernatural provision of divine grace.

Quite clearly, then, with Gogarten and Tillich, the justification principle takes on essentially post-Protestant and non-Christian features. Not only is its content emptied of New Testament essentials, but its form is shaped by theosophy rather than by theology. A justification that requires even Christians to give up all their revealed knowledge of God, to surrender supernatural realities, to forgo the metaphysical significance of Jesus Christ, is a justification totally foreign to the first Christians. As Zahrnt observes, if the people who longed at the waning of the Middle Ages for a more authentic way of speaking about God had thought that Luther’s Reformation must necessarily end this way, they would “have put their hands over their ears in horror and cried: ‘Anything but that!’” (The Question of God, p. 359).

Nowhere did neo-Protestant theology seriously question its speculative extensions and reformulations of justification in terms of radical faith. Rather, justification was made to imply the epistemological theory that all knowledge is historically conditioned, that faith requires the rejection of objective truths, that faith is uninterested in the historical actuality of saving events, that even the severest criticism of the natural and historical sciences could in no way jeopardize the vitality and propriety of faith: moreover, Protestantism, it was held, historically sponsored and licensed these views.

In his early writings, Barth had insisted that the revelation of the Living God is confined to Jesus Christ. He later acknowledged that this view could not rest simply on the contention that divine revelation enlists only nonintellectual trust in its exposure of the ambiguity of man’s righteousness. In his earlier view, faith was considered to be implicit in the question “Who am I?,” and accessible to man as man; its connection with God’s unique act in Christ, therefore, seemed hardly necessary. He came to see, however, that a flat rejection of objective knowledge of God and historical revelation threatened to dissolve divine disclosure into theological subjectivism. Under counter-pressure by Bultmann and existentialists, Barth, therefore, increasingly sought to inform faith with cognitive significance, and stressed the external objectivity of Christ’s resurrection, though he continued to place the event beyond the reach of historical inquiry.

Despite Barth’s maneuverings toward revelational quasi-objectivity in history and in cognition, not only Bultmann but also many post-Bultmannian theologians continue to combine their insistence on God’s once-for-all disclosure in Jesus Christ with the costly thesis that faith is consistent with radical doubt. For all the assertion of the “new quest” of the historical Jesus, Gerhard Ebeling, for instance, contends that the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith is mirrored in the unqualified abandonment of historical considerations to critical methodology: “Protestantism of the nineteenth century, by deciding in principle for the critical historical method, maintained and confirmed … the decision of the Reformers in the sixteenth century” (Word and Faith, Fortress, 1963, p. 55). Ebeling’s interest is not the vindication of authentic as against spurious historical claims. In his essay on “The Significance of the Critical Historical Method for Church and Theology in Protestantism,” he postulates an inner connection between justification by faith, which assertedly requires us to live without any kind of security, and critical-historical methodology which undercuts any assurance that faith might find in external historical facts.

The announced effort of some post-Bultmannians to maintain some measure of historical rootage for Christian faith would in principle sacrifice, as Van Austin Harvey rightly comments, “the meaning of justification by faith which the ‘new questers’ also want to preserve” (The Historian and the Believer, London: SCM Press, 1967, p. 196). Most post-Bultmannians in fact really have no desire to reassert a historical or rational justification of faith. Ernst Fuchs, for example, still insists no less strenuously than Bultmann that to ground faith in objective demonstration would involve the human intellect in a form of illusory self-justification. A free faith would be precluded, he contends, if belief in the Gospel of the risen Christ were established by eyewitnesses: “The witnesses of a particular, repeated happening are in competition with faith, and what they have seen is in competition with the gospel which is to be believed” (Gessamelte Aufsätze, Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965, III, 276). So, too, Hans Conzelmann combines historical skepticism and cognitive uncertainty with existential justification in a manner that detaches faith from objective truth about God and the factuality of Christ’s resurrection (An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament, Harper & Row, 1969).

It becomes increasingly apparent that the dialectical-existential severance of divine revelation from rational cognizability and from external historical events leads inevitably to the loss both of special and of general revelation, since it hopelessly weakens the meaning of the term revelation. (Whatever else may be said about Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theology—and it is not beyond serious evangelical criticism—he sees clearly that the right aim of historical method is not, as recent modern theology would have it, to plunge the believer into such uncertainty about history that he can live only by a leap of faith, but rather to ascertain knowledge about the past). To be sure, the rejection of intelligible divine disclosure and of external divine revelation in nature and history was correlated in dialectical-existential theology, in its alternative emphasis solely on personal non-propositional confrontation, with an insistance that God confronts man only in and through his Word, Jesus Christ. Yet Bultmann’s view of faith as authentic human existence, or self-surrender inspired by the symbol of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, not only leaves in doubt the indispensability of a past unique act of God in Jesus of Nazareth, but also accommodates the logical possibility of another symbol of faith serviceable to those to whom Christ is unknown. If the faith that justifies is a matter of existential self-understanding, divorced from dependence on objectively revealed divine truths and external historical saving events, cannot man realize his own true nature independently of Jesus of Nazareth?

Bultmann concedes this possibility only in theory; he insists that God’s prior initiative in Christ must in actuality be assumed because only in the proclamation (kerygma) about Christ has authentic existence been realized.

But so-called left wing post-Bultmannians take the other option. Fritz Buri and Schubert M. Ogden contend that the neo-Protestant understanding of “justification” has as its logical consequence the radical universal character of divine grace; to identify it solely with a divine act in Jesus Christ they consider to be an arrogant theological presumption (Schubert M. Ogden, Christ Without Myth, Harper, 1961, pp. 145 f.). If Christian faith rests on no objective truth and no historical actualities, but depends rather upon a personal act of God in an event about which very little can be known, then radical faith becomes a universal possibility. Pointing to Bultmann’s deliberate distinguishing of self-understanding from belief in the cross and resurrection of Christ as objective events, the left-wing post-Bultmannians ask: If faith is a passage from inauthentic to authentic existence, without necessary dependence on an objective historical event in the past, is such faith not a possibility for man as man? Ogden takes the coordination of justification with doctrinal disengagement seriously: the teaching that salvation is by Christ alone is labeled—not “absurdly,” as Carl Braaten thinks (New Directions in Theology Today, Volume II: History and Hermeneutics, London: Lutterworth, 1968, p. 85), but in a way quite consistent with the existentialist premise—as “the final and most dangerous triumph” of “the heretical doctrine of works-righteousness.” This heresy, he says, we can now avoid only by stressing “that God saves man by grace alone in complete freedom from any saving ‘work’ of any kind traditionally portrayed in the doctrines of the person and work of Jesus Christ” (p. 145).

With an eye on the unstable Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian defense of once-for-all disclosure in Jesus Christ the Word, Van Austin Harvey takes the final step. Since neo-Protestant theology equates faith with trust or decision and detaches revelation from both cognitive truth and specific historical beliefs, Harvey contends that the content of faith may be as readily mediated by historically false myths as by actual historical events (The Historian and the Believer, pp. 280 f.). This view, he argues, “tries to take with utmost seriousness both the Protestant principle of justification by faith and the historical character of human existence, of which the morality of human knowledge is but a formalized constitutive part” (p. 288).

Thus, the neo-Protestant restatement of justification by faith as an epistemological principle attaching faith to cognitive doubt finally succeeds in destroying justification by faith as a soteriological principle that attaches faith to God’s saving revelation and redemption in Jesus Christ. A formless and contentless belief—rendered so by the loss of universally valid truth and of external historical grounding—must cut itself off from necessary connections with Jesus of Nazareth, from justification by faith in an authentically biblical understanding, and must attach itself instead to radical faith as a possibility available to every man as man. It is then free to draw its life-giving spirit from pseudo-scientific dogmas about the impossibility of miracle or the irrelevance of the supernatural, or from historicist dogmas that dismiss Judeo-Christian revelation as myth by hardening modern doubt into anti-Christian finality. When justification by faith is thus perverted into the speculative theory that revelational truths and revelational history are efforts at self-justification, the essential connection of Christian faith with intelligible and historical revelation is sacrificed on the altar of scientific-historical positivism.

The recent epistemological perversion of this soteriological principle must be seen as a massive delusion of self-justification. In their self-disengagement from the cognitive content of divine revelation, neo-Protestant theologians pleaded their personal humility and protested presumptive pride in the evangelicals’ attachment to the truth of Scripture. But it should be crystal clear that their modern justification of doubt is a pridefully presumptive repudiation of the rational content of the Living God’s intelligible disclosure and of his redemptive acts in external history. The neo-Protestant reconstruction of justification by faith is, in fact, a massive self-delusion, a subtle self-justification of the contemporary revolt against reason and against revelation in its Judeo-Christian understanding.

A theology of this kind needs more than renewal; it needs God’s forgiveness. All our theology, of course, stands always in need of purification by the inspired Scriptures; some of it needs to be purged. But can a speculative theology that guarantees its own justification in advance by correlating divine acceptance with man’s courageous ignorance, hope for a pardon of which it feels no need?

Ironically enough, evangelical theology must acknowledge that Roman Catholicism, whose misinterpretation of justification the Reformation protested, today has more understanding than does the influential vanguard of neo-Protestant theologians who have miscarried the doctrine to the point of mischief and misbelief. Were it not for the emerging radicals in the Church of Rome today, not a few evangelicals would seek liaison for examining biblical justification by faith, particularly with devout Catholics who show a new respect for the Bible. The neo-Protestant perversion of justification is so much worse than the medieval misconstruction that ecumenical Christianity can now profit by hearing of what the Scholastics had to say, although it is only through what the Scriptures have to say, of course, that we, like Luther, can find the way again.

Karl Barth could speak of the revelation of God as a clap of thunder in the Swiss Alps. For Paul Tillich, faith was like a flash of lightning that in a stormy night throws everything into a blinding clarity for just a moment. Barth’s thunder has worn itself silent, and Tillich’s momentary light has waned. The mind of modern man, whose doubt and sense of meaninglessness even theologians venture to justify, stumbles in blindness and night. May God who justifies authentically, on his own terms, and in his own way, cause the Light to shine and the Word to be heard again. And may theology experience forgiveness of sins in a gracious rediscovery and proclamation of authentic justification by faith alone.

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Seminarians of the current and coming generations may well become the most “ignorant” generation of preachers in the later history of the Church. Now that they have succeeded in having the study of Greek and Hebrew made optional, seminarians must decide about exegesis and semasiology (semantics) before they understand the words, much less the ramifications of their decision.

Writing to his friends at Corinth, Paul expressed a concern about their being “uninformed” about the gifts of the Spirit and their use in the life and worship of the church (1 Cor. 12:1, RSV). The Greek word is agnoein. It has the sense of being unknowing, uninformed, unenlightened. The King James Version here translates agnoein as “ignorant,” and it is in this sense I use the word.

The Revised Standard Version is not a new translation but a revision of earlier English versions. The preface states that the preparation involved studying the biblical text in its original languages as well as in earlier translations, in order to make the Word of God clear so that God might speak “to men in these momentous times, and … help them understand and believe and obey His Word.”

Much current sentiment about the study of Greek and Hebrew does not lie in this direction. The 1969 General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church gave preliminary approval to a proposal to omit study of the original languages of Scripture from required seminary courses. Other denominations have already approved similar actions.

Making this language study optional implies, of course, that it is of only secondary importance in the training of the minister. Given that implication, the seminarian is understandably reluctant to subject himself to such rigorous courses.

One line of reasoning given for making language study optional begins with the complexities of modern civilization and begrudges time devoted to study of Greek and Hebrew; this time might better be spent, it is said, in the study of sociological disciplines. Another line of reasoning is based on the ready availability of many translations and exegetical studies. Both these arguments rest, in my opinion, upon fallacies. The first fallacy is that extensive knowledge of man in his world is adequate for effective ministry. The second is that translations and exegetical studies are adequate for “rightly dividing the word of truth.”

The first fallacy is readily derived from today’s theological climate. Daniel Day Williams, in his presidential address before the American Theological Society on March 31, 1967, described that climate as one in which the locus of theology (and thus, by extension, of preaching and of the total work of the ministry) can no longer be considered to be study about God. For our modern world it must be the theo-sociological study of man. If we grant this premise, the meaning of man’s life is to be sought through examination of what Williams called “the justice which orders his social existence,” rather than man’s relationship to God in Jesus Christ.

Making man the locus of theology greatly diminishes the need for study of the Scriptures, which are above all a recital of God’s redemptive acts in history and are not primarily concerned with man, except in his relation to God. The Bible, then, is no longer “the only rule for faith and practice,” as the Westminster Divines described it, but simply another sourcebook for man’s quest of knowledge about himself. As a consequence, knowledge of the original languages, sufficient to enable one to interpret “lexically, syntactically, contextually, historically, and according to the analogy of Scripture” (as it is put in a hoary formula beloved of professors of exegesis and ingrained in the thinking of many generations of preachers), is no longer important.

When preaching is no longer required to be biblical—that is, based upon exposition of the authoritative Word of God—it soon degenerates into a potpourri of discourses on current events, the arts, new books, and countless other matters. Anything can then become a basis for preaching. The late Halford Lucco*ck, as professor of preaching at Yale Divinity School and through his numerous writings, has probably influenced more preachers than any other man in recent history. A number of times he commented pungently on this addiction to preaching on extra-biblical themes. Once he remarked that he and his generation had the same qualifications for speaking a word of warning about this addiction as did the prodigal for speaking of pig pens—they had been there, had suffered that addiction, and found it wanting. His conclusion was that extra-biblical preaching led only to homiletical poverty.

A seminary student who makes man the center of his study is in the same position as a law student who neglects courses in law so he can study man in society. There must be a foundation upon which ministry is based, a plumb-line by which it is judged. This cannot be man, transient, changeable, and varying in his capacities for good, for then knowledge and understanding would be equally impermanent, disappearing with the dust of history.

It is interesting to note that much of what is now called “prophetic” preaching becomes passé as quickly as today’s newspaper, while preaching that is biblical is timeless. The expository sermons of Luther, Calvin, Augustine, and Spurgeon still glow with life and vitality, despite their age. The reason is that they are rooted in the imperishable. Those who desire to be “prophetic” in our time often forget that the basis of the prophetic message was a relationship to God. The beginning of any truly prophetic ministry, whether of Amos, Micah, or the preacher to Metropolis, is a knowledge of what God has said. This knowledge and experience must be first-hand, gained through prayer, study, and preparation, for us no less than for the prophets and apostles of old. We must first receive the Word into our own life before we can share it with others.

Is not the primary concern of congregations today the same as that of Zedekiah, “Is there any word from the LORD?” (Jer. 37:17). The need for our time is nothing less than Jeremiah’s answer, “There is!” But how can preachers give that assurance if they themselves are “ignorant” of the Word of God?

The assumption that the multiplicity of available translations gives one all the tools he needs for “rightly dividing the word of truth” is fallacious also. Translators suffer from the same vagaries of thought, the same occasional spiritual sloth, the same variations of belief and conviction that are the lot of us all. They take the Word, subject it to their own abilities and belief, and translate it into words and phrases adequate for them—but perhaps woefully insufficient for others. The long debates and discussions among translators involved in preparing new versions is proof enough.

Dr. William Barclay, in the preface to his New Testament Wordbook, says:

Translation from one language into another is in one sense impossible. It is always possible to translate words with accuracy when they refer to things. A chair is a chair in any language. But it is a different matter when it is a question of ideas. In that case some words need, not another to translate them, but a phrase, or a sentence, or even a paragraph. Further, words have associations. They have associations with people, with history, with ideas, with other words, and these associations give words a certain flavor which cannot be rendered in translation, but which affects their meaning and significance in the most important way [SCM Press, 1955].

How can a preacher really know what the Scriptures say to the world today if he must always depend upon a translator? For example, how can he be sure what Paul meant by “reconciliation” in that classic passage, Second Corinthians 5:18–20 (classic, at least, for Presbyterians who have struggled through debates over the “Confession of 1967”!), unless he can study the Greek New Testament and lexical aids, seeing for himself the rich tapestry woven by the use of katalassein in the New Testament and in classical literature? I believe that much of the misunderstanding over this word would have been avoided had those responsible been honest students of the Greek.

So also the study of Hebrew. Is the English language capable of paralleling the richness of the Hebrew concept of justice contained in mishpat and tsedeq? Recent additions to Old Testament studies by archaeological findings require that one be competent in Hebrew to judge their worth.

A classic text for preaching upon which the intellectually honest student soon founders is Job 13:15: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.” This beloved King James translation is majestic in its portrayal of Job’s selfless devotion to God. The Revised Standard Version offers a very different translation: “Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope; yet I will defend my ways to his face.” Comparison with other translations only increases the variety of choices. The final decision must be the individual reader’s. With no knowledge of the Massoretic text and marginal notes, he cannot understand the possibilities for mistranslation inherent in the Hebrew text itself, so his choice is already crippled. Implicitly trusting the King James over the Revised Standard translators may be satisfying, but it is a subjective choice based upon a personal bias rather than upon biblical evidence, and is intellectually dishonest.

If we believe that God, who inspired the writing of his Word, will also illumine it to our hearts and souls and life, then obviously the first requirement for rightly dividing the word of truth is simply to know that Word, in all its original glory. If our knowledge of that Word is always a second-hand experience, through another’s translation, interpretation is much more difficult.

Of course, there have been many pulpit giants unlearned in Greek and Hebrew. But is it unfair to suggest that their Bible exposition might have been much more effective if they had mastered the original languages? The Church, the world, and the Kingdom will always be poorer for lack of able exegetes. Intellectual integrity should not allow men to preach, daring to be spokesmen for God, while willingly lacking first-hand knowledge of his Word.

A judgment made by two scholars about the problems of interpreting the New Testament is equally applicable to the Old:

All the New Testament books were written … in Greek, for Greek-speaking readers, by men who for the most part themselves lived in a Greek-speaking society. There can, then, be no accurate reconstruction of primitive Christian thought which does not rest upon an accurate knowledge of the meaning which the Greek words used by the Christian writers had for their readers. Philology and lexicography form the essential groundwork of the interpretation of the New Testament [Sir Edward Hoskyns and Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament, Faber and Faber, 1931].

Rereading the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching that are still in print is always rewarding, particularly when one looks for a specific concept common to the lecturers. Almost without exception they were strongly convinced that real preaching is always biblical. This note, sounded constantly during the almost one hundred years of the lectureship, is usually accompanied by the caution that biblical preaching demands competence in studying the Word.

J. B. Phillips’s experience during translation is shared by all who have ever sat down with the Greek or Hebrew Testament to work out a translation and exposition. His “Translator’s Testimony” given in Ring of Truth speaks movingly of the greater effect his work had upon himself than upon those who might read his work. Most evangelical Christians come to the seminary with a love of the Word, nurtured by years of reading, meditation, and prayer. But what joy is theirs when they work with the actual language of Paul, John, David, or Jeremiah, and the Word begins to glow with vitality and truth unchanged through thousands of years! How shallow and superficial their previous understanding and knowledge then appears!

Coming face to face with eternal truth, in such first-hand experience, changes us. And when it has changed us and spoken to our hearts, we are ready to say, “Thus saith the Lord!” We can then lead a congregation to feed on his Word. Then the immense value of those long hours of agonizing work with conjugations, declensions, and vocabulary drills becomes clear.

A potential preacher will not deliberately choose ignorance if he wants to become, as the Today’s English Version of Second Timothy 2:15 has it, a “worker who is not ashamed of his work, one who correctly teaches the message of God’s truth.”

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The true worship of the living God frees us from pride and bestial*ty.

Animal trainer Ivan Tors has been quoted as saying that the more he sees of animals, the less he thinks of man. To prove that a peaceable kingdom is a possibility—at least on his 260-acre preserve near Los Angeles—he has combined such unlikely pen-mates as a python and a chimpanzee, a lion and an elephant, and, most unlikely of all, a tiger and a fawn. “We humans live a phony existence,” he has said. “We have fallen out of rhythm with nature” (Time, June 16, 1967).

Earlier this year a United Press International writer captured the bestial*ty involved in the death of a child in Waco, Texas:

Little Ronald Curry got his prayers all wrong, so his father beat him and had him say them over again, police said. Ronnie, 4, ended his second attempt at prayer with: “God bless Mommy and Daddy.” They were his last words. Ronnie died the next day from the beating his father gave him with an auto fan belt and a stick.… Dr. Walter Krohn, a pathologist who testified at the trial, said the boy’s bruises and cuts were too numerous to count. He said the only body he had seen in worse condition was that of the victim of an airplane crash.

Our Apparent bestial*ty

The relation between human behavior and animal behavior has been much debated. Men can, it seems, stoop to the animal level. We might say of a man who beats his wife and children in a drunken stupor, breathing ugly threats of even greater violence, “What a dirty rat!” But an important distinction must be drawn between human and animal behavior.

C.S. Lewis begins chapter three of his book The Four Loves with a discussion of “the love in which our experience seems to differ least from that of the animals”:

Let me add at once that I do not on that account give it a lower value. Nothing in man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts. When we blame a man for being “a mere animal” we mean not that he displays animal characteristics (we all do) but that he displays these, and only these, on occasions where the specifically human was demanded. (When we call him “brutal” we usually mean that he commits cruelties impossible to most real brutes; they’re not clever enough.)

The cruelties an animal does, he does by nature; the cruelties a man does, he does by a perversion of his true nature. The difference between brutality from a beast and brutality from a man is that the beast doesn’t know any better and a man does—or should. There is an “oughtness” built into us by the Almighty God that is utterly foreign to a beast. This “oughtness” is now denied by many, especially among the college-age youth of our land. People are deceiving themselves into thinking either that there is no ultimate, knowable standard of behavior expected of us human beings, or that it is up to the individual or group to set up the standards by which a person will live his life. In this way we think we can slip out from under the demands of God upon our lives, and the high destiny that marks our creation.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote: “If I wish to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky and soda, I slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a man!’ No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating its tenth explorer would slap it on the back and say, ‘Be a crocodile!’” (Foundations). Man was created to live on a level far above that of the brutes. When he stoops to animal behavior, then he really becomes much worse than an animal. “Man posing as an animal becomes a more cruel animal, for no self-respecting wolf would have planned Dachau; man posing as an angel or Atlas is a f*ckless and muddle-headed sham, tragicomic at last in his inflated pride” (George Buttrick in Biblical Thought and the Secular University, p. 15). A few summers ago I watched a mother woodpecker trying to show her baby how to climb a tree, and I thought: people can be worse than animals—some of us parents do not care for our children as well as birds provide for theirs.

“A Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” says one of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Brothers Karamazov, “told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs”:

They burn villages, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ear to the fences, leave them there until morning, and in the morning they hang them—all sorts of things you can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but this is a great injustice and insult to the beasts. A beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws; that is all he can do. But he would never think of nailing people by the ears, even were he able to do it [Pt. II, Bk. V, Chap. 55].

What a terribly mistaken notion it is to link sin with the brutality of our supposed animal ancestry.

When we stoop to a supposed animal level, God says, “I created you to be more than that.” “… Become mature men, reaching to the very height of Christ’s full stature” (Eph. 4:13, Today’s English Version). When we try to rise to the pinnacle of absolute power, God says, “I made you a little less than God.” The true worship of the living God frees us from deceitful pride and the wretchedness of a worse than animal existence. Jesus Christ is God’s revelation of the true human being into whose likeness we need to be remade. When we do not know who God is and try to climb to godlikeness ourselves, we are enjoined to look above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. When we do not know who we are and stoop to a level below that of animals, we are again encouraged to look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

A Biblical Example

King Nebuchadnezzar is an example to us of the heights and depths to which a man can go. Daniel 4 recounts for us how the king was lifted up in pride at his earthly achievements. “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” For truly feeling this way he was struck down, “driven from among men” and made to eat grass like an ox, dwelling among the beasts of the field. So too for us today. A person who thinks he is or can be master of all he surveys is on a direct road to loss of reason. G.K. Chesterton says somewhere that the person who thinks he can get heaven into his head will have his head explode. It would be better, he said, to get your head into heaven. In his Pensées the great Jansenist mathematician Blaise Pascal reflects: “Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute” (358). Anyone who saw the Hollywood film production of Lawrence of Arabia could not but be struck with the truth of that statement. The “great” Lawrence started out as a god whom no one could resist, one to whom the fates bowed down; in the end, he killed and plundered as no mere animal. He died a senseless death, as neither a god, a man, nor a beast, but as an ink blot on the page of history.

Only after King Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged God’s sovereignty did his “reason,” his sanity, return. “At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives for ever.… At the same time my reason returned to me.… Now I … honor the King of heaven; for all his works are right and his ways are just; and those who walk in pride he is able to abase” (Dan. 4:34–37).

This insight is as applicable to the nation proud of its space exploits and imperial sway as it is to the drunken father or the hippie cut-up. The true worship of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ frees a person from both vaunted pride and black despair. Pascal again has a word for this generation:

It is dangerous to make man see too clearly his equality with the brutes without showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to make him see his greatness too clearly, apart from his vileness. Man must not think that he is on a level either with the brutes or with the angels, nor must he be ignorant of both sides of his nature; but he must know both [Pensées, 418].

It is to his lasting credit that John Calvin treated this same subject with characteristic clarity. He writes in his Institutes:

If all men are born and live to the end that they may know God, and yet if knowledge of God is unstable and fleeting unless it progresses to this degree, it is clear that all those who do not direct every thought and action in their lives to this goal degenerate from the law of their creation. This was not unknown to the philosophers. Plato meant nothing but this when he often taught that the highest good of the soul is likeness to God, where, when the soul has grasped the knowledge of God, it is wholly transformed into his likeness. In the same manner also Gryllus, in the writings of Plutarch, reasons very skillfully, affirming that, if once religion is absent from their life, men are in no wise superior to brute beasts, but are in many respects far more miserable. Subject, then, to so many forms of wickedness, they drag out their lives in ceaseless tumult and disquiet. Therefore, it is worship of God alone that renders men higher than the brutes, and through it alone they aspire to immortality [I, 3, 3].

The greatness of man is so evident, says Pascal, that “it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature we call in man wretchedness; by which we recognize that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his” (Pensées, 409). The essence of our sanity—that is, our true humanity—is to experience pride abased and express the true worship of the Almighty Father in heaven.

Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom includes the righteous rule of the ideal king of David’s line (Isa. 11:1–9). This “shoot from the stump of Jesse” will be filled with the Spirit of the Lord, and he will rule “with righteousness.” That is why “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid … for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” The peaceable kingdom is the sphere of right relationships, with God our Father and his Son seen and acknowledged as the final authority, and with us as humble children, no better or worse than our brother man.

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Reminiscences of an octogenarian

To ascend the balcony of remembrance, as I have been invited to do, and in retrospective mood describe the road I have traversed, interpreting the things learned on the way, confronts this traveler with a delicate task. Yet there are indeed moments in life’s pilgrimage when action on the road must give place to reflection from the balcony.

From the balcony of quiet retirement, therefore, let an oldster whose Celtic surname means “son of a firebrand” briefly recount some of his life’s most creative experiences. Let him identify the major realities that have shaped his thinking and his living down the years. Let him also set in relief some crucial issues, in both the secular and the religious order, that have stirred within him ever deepening concern.

My life’s most revolutionary discovery was the reality of God as a loving and sovereign Presence. This discovery came in early boyhood. Following a period of anxious yearning, expressed each night before falling asleep in the words “Lord, help me,” I experienced a revolutionary change of attitude toward God, toward myself, and toward others. Of a sudden I found myself a new being. The Bible, especially the Psalms and the Letters of St. Paul, became more exciting reading than the books of fiction I adored.

The passage that gripped me most deeply and interpreted to me most fully my new selfhood was that affirmation of Paul to fellow Christians in Ephesus, “And you he made alive, when you were dead …” (Eph. 2:1). The way was opened for an understanding of grace, the Gospel, and the new life in Christ. Moments of rapture and ecstasy were not uncommon in those first months. In solitary hikes among the Scottish hills I conversed with God. Jesus Christ became the center of my being.

As time passed, and new frontiers had to be crossed, there developed a sense of Christ’s personal presence and companionship. He was my light and my strength, my teacher and guide, my fellow pilgrim and crusader. There was this also. The reality of God as a sovereign as well as a loving presence was becoming increasingly meaningful and exciting. Life had become adventure; the expected was now the unexpected.

Providential circ*mstances, including a scholarship, had made possible my enrollment in the Royal Academy of my home town, Inverness. The Baillie brothers, John and Donald, both destined to become eminent theologians, were fellow schoolmates. We were also members of a debating society that met on Friday evenings. Circ*mstances no less providential opened the way later for periods of study in Aberdeen, Princeton, Madrid, Lima, and Bonn. At the core of my movement from one academic center to another was preoccupation with what I had come to regard as God’s call to be a Christian missionary. I sought the cultural preparation that seemed most expedient to equip me for effective missionary service.

The calm certainty of God’s sovereign guidance that inspired me and determined basic decisions had its source in words addressed to Deity by a Hebrew psalmist, who said, “I trust in thee, O LORD, I say, ‘Thou art my God.’ My times are in thy hand” (Ps. 31:14, 15). These words were the text of my senior class sermon in the spring of 1915, on the eve of leaving Princeton Seminary to begin my missionary career in the Hispanic world. The sense of a divine hand that pointed the way, and lent support to the Christian traveler on the road, brought determination and peace to my spirit. To the direction and care of the loving and sovereign Being whose I was and whom I desired to serve, I left my all. Graduation from seminary was followed by study in Spain, ordination as a Presbyterian minister, and union in marriage to one who had had a spiritual experience similar to my own and who, since wedlock, has been my fellow pilgrim. Arrival in Peru, amid the turmoil of World War One, was the beginning of a new era.

Along the road traversed in the fulfillment of my missionary commitment, I encountered from time to time what I have called undersigned coincidences. By this I mean unanticipated combinations of events that facilitated the achievement of my objective. Sometime in the future I hope to deal concretely and at length with undesigned coincidences as creative landmarks on the highway of Christian decision. But for the moment I limit myself to this observation. When it is contended that God does not exist, or that, if he ever did, he is now dead or irrelevant, I ask the new atheists this question: “Upon what do you base the assumption, scientific or philosophical, that what I allege to have been a lifetime experience of the reality of God and his directive guidance has been pure illusion?”

My second life discovery was this: In quest of the most effective way to make Christ and the Gospel real and relevant I learned the incarnational approach to the human situation. To this approach my life became dedicated. What do I mean?

God’s approach to the problem of man was given dynamic expression in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The close identification with humanity of Christ, the God-man, and his concern to communicate the Gospel of the Kingdom by word, life, and deed to all types of people, provide the goal and the pattern for an effective Christian approach to man and his problems in every land and epoch. By being what he was, caring for people, and accepting the consequences of his loyalty to God and man, Christ triumphed and won the right to be heard. There are people today who, though they disdain the Church, Christianity, and religion, have limitless admiration for Jesus Christ, and are ready to listen to what he said, and to what is said about Him by persons they have learned to respect.

I learned early in my career as an educational missionary in Lima, Peru, that if I was to be taken seriously and to succeed in influencing others in the direction of the Christian faith, it was essential to establish close ties of friendship with them, become sensitive to their problems and concerns, and learn to understand their cultural background and aspirations. As the years went by I became so closely identified with everything Hispanic, with the Spanish language and literature, with Latin-Americans and their cultural, social, political, and religious concerns, that I ceased to be regarded as a foreigner. People of all types were ready to listen to me. In private homes and public halls, in grade schools and high schools, in university auditoriums and workmen’s clubs, in churches, seminaries, and monasteries, in YMCA centers and summer camps, it was my privilege to discuss the question as to what it means to fulfill the vocation of being a real person, a true human being. In doing this in the way most meaningful to my audience, I sought to portray the figure of the “Man of Galilee” and his relevance to all of life. My first public address was to an audience in the Peruvian Sierra. The mayor of the town presided. My theme was Le Profesion de Hombre (“The Vocation of Being a Man”). My first book in Spanish was on the Parables of Jesus (Mas Yo os Digo—But l Say to You); the second was on the meaning of life (El Sentido de la Vida).

So far as academic audiences were concerned, the fact that during the years spent in Peru I had served for a period as professor of metaphysics in St. Marcos University, Lima, the oldest university in the Western hemisphere, brought me many invitations in later years. It was my privilege to give addresses in thirty-five Latin American universities, located in sixteen different countries, on diverse themes and issues. But the finality pursued was always the same: the reality and relevance of Jesus Christ.

The most momentous academic experience of my life was in Mexico in 1928. It happened during the Calles regime, very shortly after his government had expropriated all church property and prohibited ministers of religion, Roman Catholic and Protestant, from voting in the Mexican elections. I happened to be giving talks on the teachings of Jesus in the YMCA Center in Mexico City when the invitation came to me from the National University to deliver three lectures. At the first lecture the president of the university presided. My topic was the Spanish poet-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, whom I had come to know personally in Spain, and whose works had had a profound influence on my own thinking. Unamuno was recognized then, as he is now, as the greatest thinker in the Hispanic world. After dealing with the Basque writer as poet-philosopher and man of letters, I drew attention to the fact that, though unrelated to any religious organization, Unamuno was personally a Christian, and a profound lover of Jesus Christ. I concluded the lecture with a critique of his lyrical poem The Christ of Velázquez, a meditation on the Crucified Christ, which is recognized as the greatest poetic gem in the Spanish language. My final words were a citation of the two last lines of this poem:

My eyes fixed on Thine eyes, O Christ,

My gaze lost in Thee, Lord.

In the other two lectures I discussed Nietzsche’s Man and Superman and The Problems of Our Epoch. Toward the close of each lecture I moved to a presentation of the figure and abiding relevance of the real “Superman,” Jesus Christ.

This method of presenting Christ to highly sophisticated and secularized audiences, people completely alienated from religion and the Church, was possible because I had learned that, if a Christian approach to man and his problems is to succeed and be truly redemptive, the foreign word must become indigenous flesh. As the years passed, the pragmatic validity of this imperative became increasingly apparent. The practice of the incarnational approach brought in its train moving experiences of fellowship with people of the most diverse backgrounds and their response to the Christian message.

Nothing has brought me greater joy in recent years than the adoption of the incarnational approach by Christian groups, both Protestant and Catholic, at the grass roots of Latin American society. Of the many instances that might be mentioned I cite but two. The enthusiastic commitment to this approach on the part of Penetecostal groups, and of the Latin America Mission with its visionary creation “Evangelism-in-Depth,” together with the total rejection of everything purely impositional or condescensional, has produced in Latin American countries the most phenomenal church growth in modern history. Ardent lovers of Christ and of people, by identifying themselves closely with common folk and becoming sensitive to their spirit and needs, have succeeded in winning their esteem and with it an attentive hearing of the spiritual message. I thank God, in particular, for the Pentecostal movement in Chile and for the contribution it has made to the spiritual and social welfare of the Chilean masses. Representatives of the Chilean government and universities publicly expressed their gratitude for this some years ago.

As for me personally, in the early thirties new horizons began to open in life’s pilgrimage. New frontiers had to be crossed. New issues had to be confronted that challenged my philosophy of mission. I was gripped by a new sense of the Church, its meaning and its role. Responding to what I believed to be God’s call to a new type of missionary service, and in obedience to the directive guidance of the “Hand,” I moved to the United States. I became involved in theological education as teacher and administrator. I began to play a part in the shaping of mission policy. I participated in the production and development of the ecumenical movement. Responsibilities increased and wider horizons opened. But one commitment remained. I sought in every human situation, whether secular or religious, to be incarnationally sensitive to the persons and issues involved, whoever and whatever they were.

Something happened—another frontier was reached on the incarnational path I had learned to tread. In New York in 1949, following a visit to Asia as chairman of the International Missionary Council and a conference in Hong Kong with refugees from Mainland China, I advocated, on their recommendation, a face-to-face encounter at the topmost level between representatives of the American government and the new Communist regime in China. I was immediately labeled a Communist or pro-Communist. The McCarthy era had begun. My Church defended me. The Lord “stood by me.” The Lordship of Christ in life and history was never more real to me. But for persons and groups fearful of any change in their country’s social or political outlook, I had become an “unsafe” person, a Christian heretic.

However, my position has remained unchanged. In the solution of issues that involve conflict or misunderstanding between persons or between nations, whoever they be, there is a timeless imperative. There can be no substitute for quiet, frank, face-to-face encounter. The incarnational approach applies to all human relationships. The foreign word must become indigenous flesh. An enemy must be met eye to eye, listened to ear to ear, spoken to mouth to mouth, in the light and spirit of the “Word become flesh.”

But space has run out. For that reason I will do no more than mention here my third major discovery on life’s road, but with the hope of sharing it with readers at a later date. I have learned the significance of tragic irony. There have begun to appear in the life of this nation certain ominous traits, psychological and sociological, political and religious, that have been native to the Hispanic tradition and have had fateful consequences in Latin American lands. Signs increase in the United States of America that we are headed for a tragic era. This is said with pain by a loyal naturalized American who owes to Hispanic culture and to friends of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American ancestry more than lips can tell or life repay.

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Christianity has often been labeled a spectator sport. One wag went a step further by facetiously comparing the Church of the 1960s to a hard-fought football game: eleven men on the field who need a rest and fifty thousand in the stands who need the exercise.

There is some graphic truth in the analogy. The Church’s active “players” are relatively few in number, and many of them are weary and dry of ideas, moving along largely on momentum. The cheering section is large and vocal, making itself heard on every dramatic play; but it is unwilling or unable to get involved in the action.

No one factor can account for the inaction of the evangelical masses. Our fast-paced life is partly responsible. So is inadequate leadership. Sheer indifference also takes its toll.

Some, of course, want to join the battle but can’t. The Church has not yet made room for their talents nor related its mission to their Spirit-born burden. Perhaps this ought to be made more of a concern than our worry about adequate numerical forces. We all know the stories about the potential of a minority.

But the problem runs much deeper. This was the decade of change and uncertainty, of unfaith and disorder. It was the decade of the Second Vatican Council, the new morality, the big plunge into secularity and secularization, the popularization of process theology, the death-of-God flap, and the rise of a so-called theology of hope. It was a decade of violence—in the cities and on the campuses, in Viet Nam and the Middle East. It was a decade of shifting political power, of repression in Czechoslovakia and China, of acute racial tension, of mushrooming population and urbanization, and of growing ecological anxiety.

All these were developments of substantial consequence. Which was the most important? Or were they all overshadowed by the spacemen and their two lunar landings?

We suggest that the most surprising development of the sixties and the one with the most far-reaching significance was the rise of the hippie culture and its impact upon the world. For the Church this has meant an alarming defection of young people. No other trend so urgently demands the Church’s attention.

The hippies and their more respectable-looking fellow travelers should astonish the older generation, not because they protest the war or let their hair grow long, but because they represent an anti-materialistic trend. In this they stand between East and West—the East that officially espouses materialism but in reality has not enough goods to gloat over (and therefore appears attractively austere) and the West that theoretically renounces materialism but in practice embraces it. The hippies escape the psychological effects of their ambivalence by taking drugs and by keeping preoccupied with humane causes.What has happened is that for the time being hippiedom has captured the cultural initiative—in drama, in music, in art, and on the printed page. The Church, which again had the opportunity to move in on a changing mood, has been outdone. For lack of an authentic and relevant Christian dynamic, a humanistic, existential, irrational outlook has taken hold.

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On the night when Christ was born the angelic host declared to the small group of shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” If this is what they said, then where is the peace? All over the world, not least in the vicinity of Bethlehem, there is repeated evidence of the absence of peace on earth.

A Viet Nam Moratorium Committee leader has announced plans to use the phrase “Peace on Earth” as a rallying point for this month’s activities. We have two comments. First, we need to be careful to observe the angelic order. If all men were concerned with glorifying God, then there would indeed be peace. Second, we need to recognize that the King James Version is based at this point on a very dubious alternative reading among the surviving Greek manuscripts. The better translation is something like “peace among men (who are) well pleasing (to God).” Those who are well pleasing to God are the ones who believe the good news that on that night long ago in the city of David was born the Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.

Obviously there is not peace on earth. Indeed, Christ himself later asked his disciples if they thought he came to bring peace on earth and to their surprise answered, “No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two …” (Luke 12:51, 52). However, those of us who have received Christ as Saviour can testify that we have indeed found peace—peace with God. And as we allow Christ to have dominion in our lives there is also a peace with ourselves and a peace in the midst of the troubling circ*mstances of life. On earth there will be wars and rumors of wars until Christ returns. But also on earth, men who believe in Christ can find the angelic announcement of peace a glorious experience in the present.