Cliff Barrows
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A young minister’s two-mile walk in the rain provided the inspiration for “How Great Thou Art,” most recent addition to the great hymns of our time.
The story of the hymn gains interest through the Soviet origin of the version most commonly sung, and its delayed but amazingly swift rise to popularity.
Though as late as five years ago the hymn was still virtually unknown in North America, its lines date to 1885. The Reverend Carl Boberg of Mönsterås. on the southeast coast of Sweden, was 25 years old when he wrote the lyrics after trekking through a thunderstorm from a church meeting two miles away.
His inspiration yielded a poem of nine verses published in a local newspaper under the title, “O store Gud” (O Great God). Several years later, Boberg heard that the poem was being sung to the tune of an old Swedish folk melody. The tune is essentially the same as is used today, but it never became popular in Sweden; neither did an English translation made in 1925 (“Mighty God”).
Boberg became editor of a Christian weekly and later served 13 years as a member of the upper house of the Swedish parliament. He died in 1940 without having seen his hymn gain any extensive acceptance.
In 1907, Boberg’s poem was translated into German by Manfred von Glehn as “Wie gross bist Du” (“How Great Thou Art”). Von Glehn lived in Estonia, which included a large segment of German-speaking inhabitants. Twenty years later I. S. Prokhanoff published in Moscow a Russian translation of the Estonian-German version.
An English missionary, the Reverend Stuart K. Hine, came across the Russian version in the western Ukraine soon after it was published in 1927, and he and his wife used it as a duet during evangelistic meetings. Later he translated three verses into English and brought them back to London. He sang them regularly throughout the war years. In 1948 he added a fourth verse and a year later the hymn was published. It spread quickly through the British Commonwealth, even to Australia and New Zealand. It was introduced in the United States by James Caldwell at the Stony Brook Bible Conference on Long Island in 1951. The hymn was brought to my own attention at Harringay Arena in London in 1954, but I did not give it a fair trial until our crusade in Toronto, Canada, in 1955. There it made an immediate hit with the choir.
“How Great Thou Art” subsequently became the best-loved hymn of the Billy Graham crusades. We used it over and over again. We have heard it sung in every country we have visited, for the words are now translated into many languages. In New York in 1957 it was used more than 100 times by Bev Shea and the choir in the 119 meetings. Two years ago it became the theme of the “Hour of Decision” weekly radio broadcast.
Aside from the melody, the secret of the hymn’s popularity and effectiveness is its direct and simple manner of worship and praise to God. The attention is immediately focused upon the Lord.
Many polls indicate that “How Great Thou Art” is now one of the most beloved hymns in America and elsewhere. Some surveys rank it even higher than “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Rock of Ages.”
Another factor in its popularity lies in its wide distribution by Manna Music Company, which owns the American and Canadian copyrights to the Hine translation. We have known the Manna president, Tim Spencer, for a good many years and his desire has been to make this hymn one of the best known Gospel hymns in the world. He has allowed us to print the song as extensively as we wished for distribution to audiences and choirs. Moreover, the Manna people have themselves printed thousands of copies for distribution. They have given away as many copies as they have sold. As a result, the hymn has become available to many people who would never have heard of it had it merely been printed in a book. Hymnal inserts, for instance, are available even if they cannot be paid for.
A year ago, meditating on the words of “How? Great Thou Art,” I noted the absence of the wonderful fact of the Incarnation. In a matter of moments two verses came to me that expressed this glorious truth. These Christmas verses are reproduced here for the first time for general use. I hope they add to your enjoyment of this wonderful and blessed hymn.
Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.
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Handel H. Brown
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When Matthew quoted the glorious prophecy of Isaiah, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel,” he was inspired to add a simple explanation, “which is, being interpreted, God with us”; and I, for one, am very thankful for the interpretation.
Without it there would merely be the prosaic information “They shall call his name Immanuel,” which wouldn’t mean much more to us than “They shall call his name William.”
But the explanation is there, and the page lights up like a dull morning in December when the sun suddenly and unexpectedly explodes in the eastern sky, warm with love and fragrant with hope. “Immanuel.… God with us.” The word comes as a whisper, a still small voice, soft as the glow of altar candles, and too low to awaken the Babe sleeping in the manger.
Bishop Phillips Brooks caught the spirit of it,
How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given.
FOREGLEAMS OF THE DAWN
In a sense, “God with us” is not a new message. What is new is the language in which it is spoken. But it is a mistake to think that the world was without God until Jesus was born.
We understand the doctrine of Providence to mean that God has always been so concerned for his people that he has never left them wholly to their own devices, but has overshadowed them with his presence, even when they knew it not.
The Old Testament says, “He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel,” and we accept that statement as true by the evidence of history. The more we know of the other nations of antiquity, the more marvelous does the Jewish nation appear.
We look a little more closely at the Old Testament and find that the basic idea contained in “Immanuel” is not unknown to the other writers of the sacred books. “God with us” is something in which they earnestly believed. Listen to them:
“Certainly I will be with thee.”
“The Lord thy God is with thee withersoever thou goest.”
“My presence shall go with thee.”
“Cast me not away from thy presence.”
“In thy presence is fullness of joy.”
Yet in all these affirmations, there is something insufficient, something lacking. Were God only in creation, only in providence, in history, in conscience, or in the Old Testament, we would be unsatisfied.
Were there nothing more, we would ever cry, “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.… O that I knew where I might find him!” And our faith would be like that of the Indiana farmer who, commenting on his poor harvest, said, “My wheat didn’t do as good as I thought it would—but then, I never thought it would!”
The Old Testament closes with the book of Malachi, which means that for the Jew the revelation of God ends there. But the Jew is not content. The Patriarchs and Prophets of Israel confessed longings and hopes too deep to be satisfied with anything they had received. They acknowledged the incompleteness which they sensed; their greatest desire was to be able to say with utter finality and assurance, “God with us.”
THE BIRTH IN A STABLE
And indeed the vital Christian message did not begin until Bethlehem, in “a lowly cattle stall,” and with the chant of adoration:
Glory be to God on high,
And peace on earth descend:
God comes down, He bows the sky,
And shows Himself our Friend!
Charles Wesley
“Immanuel—God with us.”
“God hath spoken unto us—in a Son.”
The stupendous thing to which the Old Testament writers constantly referred was the deliverance of the Children of Israel from the bondage of Egypt—that amazing manifestation of might by which the Children of the Covenant were brought to safety and freedom.
But the great thing to which we look back is the birth of a weak and helpless Baby in all the poverty, filth, and stench of an Eastern stable.
God always surprises us with mysteries. His ways are not our ways. Can you imagine a more unlikely way for the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, to come to earth than the way he came? It shows how little God thinks of our nice distinctions, our ideas of what is becoming, proper, and fitting. We say, “the best for the best, and the poorest for the poorest.” God works in the opposite way: “The things that are despised hath God chosen.”
Christmas, if it means anything at all, means the consecration of the commonplace. For what could be more common than animals in a stall, hay on the ground, a cot or cradle, or more ordinary than a baby? Washing, feeding, crying, laughing, growing, grumbling—these human activities are so common that we live through them and with them without thinking. Christmas is a continual reminder that God in Christ has consecrated the commonplace things of life to confound those that are mighty.
There is no human standard by which the importance of Bethlehem can be reckoned. Bethlehem is itself the standard by which the importance of all human activity must be judged; but, like the Cross, Bethlehem is “unto them that are perishing, foolishness.”
Bethlehem is a parable of the whole life of Jesus. He was born an outcast, in a rough stable, with the winds of God beating upon him. For years he earned a livelihood for himself and the rest of the humble family to which he belonged: with taut muscles and calloused hands he did the work of a manual worker.
The day came when he, whose dwelling had been heaven, had nowhere to lay his head. A certain village once refused him a night’s lodging. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”
He was despised and rejected of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Then he died an outcast, crucified on a hill outside the city wall, with the winds of God beating upon him.
Everything in the life of Jesus fits into one great design—the Cradle and the Cross, the Manger and the Ministry. All the parts of his life tell us that he came for one purpose, and that in everything his purpose was one. He was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, that we, through his poverty, might become rich.
From the Manger to the Cross, through all the tortuous wanderings and fluctuating fortunes of that unique life—in all that he ever was, more than in all he ever said, there is one amazing message.
We see the message of his life as he stands before his frenzied parents in the Temple at the age of 12.
Toward the end of his earthly life, we see it as he weeps over Jerusalem, and as he rides a borrowed donkey for his triumphal entry. We witness it as He calmly tells a perplexed Roman governor that the power which he thinks comes from Caesar actually comes from God.
And in the agony of his death we behold it as he cries, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The message is there from the poor manger of Bethlehem to the bitter Cross of Calvary.
Yet having eyes we see not: having ears we hear not.
We come, year after year, to Bethlehem, and whether we are Wise Men, which is very unlikely, or just simple shepherds, which is far more likely, we kneel by the manger. But what have we learned from our annual pilgrimages?
We come, year after year, to Calvary. Through 40 days of Lent we follow the wandering steps of the Master as they lead to Bethany, to Jerusalem, to the Garden of Gethsemane, to Pilate’s judgment hall, to Golgotha. We see him condemned, scourged, and crucified. But what have we learned from our annual vigils?
Have we ever tried to relate Christmas to Good Friday? Do we not realize that they have the same common denominator?
Too many of us have minds like concrete—made up of innumerable fragments, all mixed up, and permanently set. We sentimentally sing,
Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head.
The stars in the bright sky
looked down where He lay,
The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.
Martin Luther
But what does it mean?
The way he entered the world which he had made, and the way he left the world which had no room for him, and the whole pattern of his life reveal glory in humiliation, sovereignty through suffering, perfection through limitation, victory through defeat, Godhead inherent in manhood, “Immanuel—God with us.”
“All praise to Thee, Eternal Lord,
Clothed in a garb of flesh and blood;
Choosing a manger for Thy throne,
While world on worlds are Thine alone.”
Martin Luther
We may well ask ourselves, “Why should this incredible thing happen?” The most important part of the answer was given by St. Augustine: “The chief cause of Christ’s coming was that men might know how much God loves them.”
In the presence of the Babe, argument ends in admiration, the rich fall down in homage, and the poor stand up in hope.
The second and subsidiary part of the answer has already been given, namely, to consecrate the commonplace. The consecration of the commonplace is the dynamic nerve-center of the Christian faith. For it was by his incarnate human life that the Lord Jesus made common things important and glorious.
That is why the Gospels are central to the Christian way of life, for they tell us all that we know of God’s gracious acts in a human context.
Christmas is a reminder to us that when we take the mystery out of Christianity we are left with a moralistic sect, of no relevance to life save only to the eccentric.
In choosing a manger for his throne, God was giving his love to us. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” It is the way of love to give, and the measure of the love is the measure of the sacrifice involved in the gift.
God’s gift is him whom we call “Immanuel,” and we rejoice that it means “God with us.” As we look again at that stable and view glory in humiliation, we know he is with us. We may receive him and rejoice in
God’s presence and His very self,
An essence all-divine.
John Henry Newman
Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.
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Charlotte F. Otten
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The city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands lay still in the sleep of morning. The noisy burr of motorbikes and the gentle whirr of bicycles were distinctly absent. All was still and dark on the Saturday morning before Christmas, 1959. All was still, that is, except for four people, four Americans awake and stirring in the Netherlands—Bob and I, and our two young sons.
This was no ordinary Saturday morning for us. Christmas vacation had begun for the boys and we were planning a one-day trip into Germany. Nijmegen is close to the German border, and one may see a great deal on a one-day excursion into it.
But today, the Saturday before Christmas, was to be different. We were not going into Germany to see the Cologne Cathedral with its two graceful spires pointing to the sky. Nor were we going to Düsseldorf, shiny and bright as a new penny. We were going to see three tiny villages in the Ruhr Valley—three drab villages which I’m quite sure many Germans have never heard of, let alone Americans. Who knows or cares about Puffendorf, Ederen, or Linnich when Europe is packed full of magnificent things to see? And why visit unknown villages when you have only 10 months to spend in Europe?
The answer was that these were Bob’s 10 months. He had come to the Netherlands as a Fulbright Research Scholar. Naturally we would be seeing the famous sights of Europe, but these three villages in the Ruhr Valley meant something to him, for he had lived in them in 1944—he and the big Army howitzers. Now, after 15 years, he wanted to retrace his war steps; he wanted to see the three villages again.
Furthermore, there was another thing he wanted to see—Margraten. Margraten was the huge American War Cemetery near Maastricht in the Netherlands where one of Bob’s friends lay buried. Surely this was destined to be a somber sort of day, this Saturday before Christmas, at least for us.
We finished breakfast quickly, and the four of us took off in our little “foreign” car down the road into the dark December morning.
As we drove along, I looked up at the many stars which were still shining. How close they seemed to be, closer than ever before. Of course we were farther north than ever before. We were in the Netherlands, not Michigan, and these plump stars were Dutch stars in a Dutch sky.
CHRISTMAS IN A CEMETERY
I wished secretly that we were not going to visit war villages and a war cemetery. Why did we have to see such reminders of tragedy? How much more appropriate would it be to go to fine art galleries and look at the famous paintings of the birth of the Prince of Peace. War at Christmas time? No!—Why not think of peace?
Somehow I had remained a stranger to war. True, Bob had spent over three years in the American Army, and 18 months in Europe. But God had blessed our family. We had come out of it all unscathed, and I preferred to forget that the Red Horse of War had ever ridden.
I had had premonitions of what we might see this day. The people in Nijmegen had seen the Red Horse, had heard him tramping through their city night after night, day after day, and they had often told us of the days of terror and depression. We had heard them tell of hunger and cruelty and death; and they always spoke as though it had happened yesterday. One friend told of the following incident. Nijmegen had been liberated by the Americans one day in 1944, and the next day there was a celebration in the bombed-out town square. Her husband had been on his way to the square when suddenly a remaining enemy stepped out from behind a building and threw a large grenade. What was left of her husband was put in a cigar box. And that was the day after Liberation! And so we had heard account after account of the riding of the Red Horse of War.
I knew one thing: I did not want to see the Red Horse of War on the Saturday before Christmas. He would surely destroy the joy and peace of Christmas.
Quietly we rode on toward Puffendorf, Ederen, and Linnich. Gradually the stars disappeared and the dawn came, and by the time it was light we had reached the war area. Burned-out tanks graced the landscape. This was farming and orchard area, but nature had not obliterated the marks of war.
Then we saw the villages. Here stood a handful of houses, ugly and scarred. Each one had its deep artillery wounds. The Red Horse had been here all right. Over there stood a house, or half a house, I should say, with a family living in the front of it and damaged bricks piled high behind it. A lonely pig could be seen scrounging for food in the debris. All around was evidence of destruction. We thought of the age-old phrase, “They make a desolation and they call it peace.” Peace was here, silent and joyless. But this was not the peace of Christmas, the joyful peace of the shepherds who welcomed the Christ-Child.
We rode on. In Ederen we saw the Purple Heart Corner. This corner had been ceaselessly shelled, and countless American boys had been wounded. Now there was no sound of artillery to shake the countryside. No guns boomed or whistled; no soldier dashed for cover. And yet, although 15 years had elapsed, it seemed as though the Red Horse had just ridden through. We could see men rebuilding one of the houses and using the old wounded bricks.
On we rode in silence. Our thoughts lay too deep for tears. Later we stopped for lunch and then continued our drive along the countryside. But never were we able to forget the three war-scarred villages of the Ruhr—“the Villages of the Red Horse,” I called them.
Now we had one more thing to see: Margraten. We crossed the border back into the Netherlands. Our young boys were the first to spot the sign for Margraten, and we turned in.
Until the Saturday before Christmas, 1959, Margraten had meant nothing to me. Now, as we stepped out to look over the grounds, the place overwhelmed me. It was all so green, and so still.
Against the rich green of the grass gleamed the tremendous white stone monument with the names of at least 500 American men engraved upon it, and standing for at least 500 separate sorrows. Their bodies were lying here at Margraten, unidentified, and occupying unknown graves. And around about we saw the white crosses, almost 9000 of them—9000 white crosses on a carpet of green. So intensely white were they and so thick that everything seemed blurred to my eyes. Infantry men were here from the Battle of the Bulge who died that Christmas in 1944, and here were pilots and artillery men. Nine thousand American boys lay in the white and green of Margraten, and yet it all seemed bloody red with the hoofmarks of the Red Horse.
We stood a long time, then climbed into our car and headed toward Nijmegen. Darkness came quickly now; it comes early in December in the Netherlands. And gradually the stars reappeared. Bright and large and seemingly very near, they shone down upon us. Suddenly the meaning of this day, this Saturday before Christmas, came to us. We understood it anew. The birth of the Prince of Peace had a fresh and poignantly beautiful meaning.
As suddenly and unexpectedly as the stars reminded us of the Star of Bethlehem, so suddenly and unexpectedly the darkness, sadness, and desolation slipped out of our hearts. The Star of Bethlehem was truly shining on us and speaking to us. And—strangest of all—the Red Horse was leading us straight to the Prince of Peace.
We began to realize how appropriate the day had been. It was in the world of war that the Prince of Peace was born. We knew that although the Red Horse could ride through the world and trample it under his hoofs, he could never triumph over it. The Prince of Peace had come and would come again, riding on a pure white horse with a Cross in his hand, and he would vanquish the Red Horse forever.
We had seen the Red Horse. But we had also seen in a new and striking way the Prince of Peace. That Saturday before Christmas, 1959, the mild Babe of Bethlehem was transformed into the triumphant Prince of Peace. And we heard great voices saying: “The Kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever.”
Unto Us … Is Born
Unto us?
Lord, unto whom?
The fair-skinned, favored,
genteel few?
Just to them?
Or unto Jew,
Oriental, Negro,
Sioux?
Unto these?
Yes, unto all
the human family,
great and small.
Christ Child,
with your arms stretched wide,
forgive our prejudice
and pride!
HELEN EARLE SIMCOX
Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.
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Addison H. Leitch
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Some months ago I made reference to a book by F. W. Bridgeman, physicist-laureate of Harvard University, titled The Way Things Are. The book made a great impression on me at the time, but I had no notion that Bridgeman’s thesis would continue to chew away at me even until today. What Bridgeman was saying among many other things was that even in physics, the most objective of all the sciences, we really know only when we remember that objective truth is always related to the subject, that is, to the person who is observing the facts. One gathers from this that relativity, which we try to throw out the window in ethics, comes in the front door to surprise us in a subject like physics.
The reason this sort of thing “gets me” is that I am beginning to suspect that the whole realm of knowledge in 1960 exists in the climate and atmosphere of a way of thinking, an epistemology, if you like, which continually weakens any attempt to say anything for sure about anything. A college sophomore’s “that’s what you think” seems to serve as sufficient answer to any discussion in which several views of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are being set forth.
We recognize this climate of opinion in the whole realm of theology. Barthianism has made wonderful contributions to our day, but it worries us with its denials of general revelation, an objective word, words which are true whether they are true for me or not, a rational approach to the Christian faith which can be tightened up beyond my subjective say-so into some kind of a reasonable system, and so forth. On the other side, there is the constant affirmation that truth is known existentially, particularly the truth in revelation. I am not concerned to tangle with Dr. Barth on these matters; I wish only to note that we have here in the most dominant theology of our day an acceptance of objective truth as primarily subservient to the subject. The Bible, for example, is true only when it is true for me in my present situation.
Let your mind now roam across other fields of knowledge and other disciplines. In philosophy we have logical positivism and left-bank existentialism. In ethics we are under the impact of a Niebuhr whose Moral Man In Immoral Society set the direction for much of his thinking and much of our own thinking by showing that our ethical choices are never made between right and wrong but rather in the area relatively where, not being able to choose the best, we can choose only the better, the better known primarily by the existential situation in which one finds oneself when one is trying to make an ethical decision. Between the high road and the low, we choose in the misty flats between.
Chief Justice Holmes popularized this kind of thinking in law, and (if I understand the workings of the Supreme Court) one of the fundamental difficulties which the judges have had in making up their collective minds lies in the relativity directly related to the day in history when the decision has had to be made. Split decisions and the opinions expressed by the judges illustrate how it is well nigh impossible to tie the case before the court with anything of which it can be said “this is the law.” There are always so many other factors “relevant” to the situation.
Try Einstein’s relativity in astronomy or Dewey’s skirting of absolutes in education, and the general looseness regarding light and darkness in psychiatry and sociology and international affairs and national politics—and we have some pretty good reasons for believing that we live in the climate and atmosphere of almost endless relativisms. “This is the way, walk ye in it” sounds like a good idea if someone could only assure us that it is true.
There stood One long ago who claimed for himself “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Desperate tides in church and state flooded over him in a day when the question “what is truth” was more germaine to the way most people were looking at things. If we had only been there we should have done differently, but how do we know we would have? But what shall we say of our own day? The tides of relativism and existentialism, subjectivity and irrationalism, are sweeping everything before them. Is there some one thing of which it can be clearly said “this is the truth” whether you ever hear it, whether it appeals to you, whether you plan to do anything about it—there is truth regardless of my attitude toward it which I may or may not accept, but that’s all the worse for me, not for the truth. I like the rise of the expression “the scandal of particularity” as I hear it in theological conversations. Particularity is a stumbling block but it may be the kind of rock which can change the current’s direction. And where the rocks are, there will the water be rough.
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An Adventure In Speculative Biology
The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Harper, 1959, 311 pp., $5), is reviewed by Bernard Ramm, Professor of Systematic Theology, California Theological Seminary.
Père Teilhard was a Jesuit priest who gave his entire life to the study of human evolution and was an internationally recognized expert on the subject. The Roman Catholic church considered some of his views extreme and did not permit him to publish his works while alive. His friends, therefore, undertook the publishing of his major writings after his death.
According to Teilhard the picture painted by modern scientists of the total universe is just a hodgepodge. It has no pattern, scheme, or reason but is a sort of Fibber McGee’s closet. Teilhard attempts to bring pattern, meaning, and sense into modern science by showing that the entire universe had one grand purpose, namely, to produce man. Therefore, this purpose can be used to harmonize the sciences. In a brief review, I cannot do justice to the elaborate schemes which Teilhard employs, nor can I discuss his invention of unique terms to suit his synthesis.
I think it was the Cambridge philosopher of religion and science, F. R. Tennant, who said that the universe was pregnant with man. Teilhard is the cosmic embryologist who attempts to trace the developmental growth from the original “cosmic atom” to the birth of man. In so doing he gives us an intriguing, brilliant, and novel interpretation of the sciences in general, and man in particular.
Of course, the interpretation is not entirely new. There is a trace of Leibniz here, for Leibniz like Teilhard finds the psychic deep down in the so-called unconscious layers of the universe. The notion of evolution being likened to a wave of life ever radiating outward dynamically and into seemingly endless proliferation of forms is a page out of Bergson. The great Catholic biologist of the nineteenth century, St. Mivart, saw evolution as the evolution to species, and this is very similar to what Teilhard calls “hominisation.” The attempt of Teilhard to create a new battery of categories and terms to treat biological thought was pioneered by Alfred N. Whitehead in his great work, Process and Reality.
Teilhard’s book confirms what another philosopher has said, namely, that the picture of the universe painted by scientists which is completely devoid of value and purpose is the height of insanity. My own opinion is that such value and purpose which must be introduced into the universe to rescue its sanity comes better from special revelation than from Teilhard’s speculative biology.
BERNARD RAMM
Effective Communication
Message and Mission, by Eugene Nida (Harper, 1960, 253 pp., $5), is reviewed by Francis Steele, Home Secretary, North Africa Mission.
If preaching the Gospel effectively to people of strange language and culture seems a simple thing to you, wait until you have read this book; it will seem well-nigh impossible! One wonders how ever Paul made out in his day before the development of semantics and cybernetics.
The sciences of linguistics and anthropology, however, have made much-needed contributions to a better understanding of the process of effective communication of the Gospel; and Dr. Nida is an acknowledged expert in both fields. There is an amazing, if not staggering, amount of eye-opening information in this volume concerning the practical problems confronting the missionary translator and preacher; information every missionary or prospective missionary should study thoroughly and consider carefully.
In what appears to me, here and there, as an overemphasis on technical problems, there is a tendency to obscure the fact that the Bible contains basic absolutes with reference to human behavior as well as in the terms in which God has chosen to reveal the Gospel. Nida eschews synchretism forthrightly, to be sure, but occasionally verges on the brink of relativism when describing the “content” of the Message (cf. p. 179 ff.).
We must never forget that both language and culture, where they depart from explicit biblical principles of truth and life, may well exhibit the influences of sin and human depravity. Where this is true, the missionary is obliged to superimpose or substitute new patterns of thought and behavior even at the expense of painful adjustment.
Sound theological training makes for proper employment of linguistics and anthropology in missions today. The latter two disciplines have greatly advanced the work of getting the Gospel out more effectively and expeditiously. Nida’s book combines all three and deserves a wide reading.
FRANCIS RUE STEELE
Propaganda For Caesar
Communism and the Churches, by Ralph Lord Roy (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1960, 495 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by E. Merrill Root, Former Professor of English, Earlham College.
Ralph Lord Roy is the Little Lord Fauntleroy of the “liberals.” Earlier, in Apostles of Discord, he was assigned the task of assassinating conservatives. His thesis was that “liberal” collectivism is orthodoxy, and conservatives who question it are “apostles of discord” and heresymongers.
In this book he is partially grown up, almost sophisticated, plausibly clever, ostensibly anti-Communist. He no longer wields a hatchet; he is Chaucer’s “smiler with the knife.” He skates bithely over the thin ice of “liberalism,” perhaps ignorant that under it lie the deep waters of 1984.
His thesis is that (save for a naughty few like Harry F. Ward, to whom he is always gentle—whereas he pours acid over the late Senator McCarthy) no one connected with the Protestant churches has been socialist—but only “social.” He never shows such gentility toward any conservative: the noble John Flynn (who wrecked his career to uphold his principles) he calls one motivated by vanity and pique. This is the double standard with a vengeance!
His history is bad. He says (p. 11), “The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, rose swiftly to power and claimed all Russia.” But he entirely ignores the true Russian Revolution which overthrew the Czar and which the Bolsheviks trampled under their hoofs.
Roy always loads his dice in favor of pro-collectivists. Two ex-Communists had just, under oath before senatorial committees, “identified” Harry F. Ward as a party member; Roy evidently accepts Ward’s denial and ignores the evidence, for he says (Mr.) “Kunzig preferred (sic)” to take their testimony rather than Ward’s “denial.” He says that Bishop Oxnam’s appearance before a committee was a triumphant “offensive” by the churches while the hearing as a whole reveals that in it Oxnam was a little more than a confused, flustered, pathetic apologist.
Roy supposes that Khrushchev is better than Stalin, that the Soviets have improved, that the cold war has “thawed” (p. 297). He insinuates that “the profit system” is a sin (p. 323). As in Apostles of Discord, he speaks (p. 269) of “professional (sic!) antagonists of the World Council of Churches” who “love to vent their hate (sic).” He whitewashes Hromadka and other Soviet partisans, because they are “churchmen.” But he smears every conservative from McCarthy to Flynn.
This book is so bad that it would require pages to document its inaccuracies, innuendos, and slanted thesis. It is against “communism” (in the card-carrying sense), but it is for the Fabian, “liberal,” collectivist dogma that sets mass above man and sees the State (Caesar) as the agent to bring about Christ’s “social” gospel. True Christianity—metaphysical, evangelical, and eternal—is drowned in seas of “social” syrup. The book is, like all contemporary “liberalism,” propaganda for Caesar.
E. MERRILL ROOT
Melancholy Dane
The Life and Thought of Kierkegaard for Everyman, by John A. Gates (Westminster, 1960, 172 pp., $3), is reviewed by John H. Gerstner, Professor of Church History and Government, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
The title of this book, The Life and Thought of Kierkegaard for Everyman, itself seems lake a paradox. If Kierkegaard is comprehensible by Everyman, how can it be Kierkegaard? If it is Kierkegaard how can he be comprehensible by Everyman? But, in the main, Dr. Gates makes good his thesis (and that of Kierkegaard himself) that the melancholy Dane can be understood by Everyman, for whom indeed he wrote. By a splendid weaving together of the events of life and of thought light is thrown on each. We comprehend the eccentric-appearing behavior of Kierkegaard by his thought and his paradoxical thought by his life.
If Dr. Gates has somewhat oversimplified the thinking of Kierkegaard, many scholars of our day over-complicate the Danish master. When most of us approach Kierkegaard in theological classrooms, we encounter an obscure thinker difficult to grasp at best and seemingly irrelevant at worst. This valuable little work, unique in its field, will serve as a corrective to any one-sidedness of the technical philosopher’s approach as well as a delightful introduction for Everyman.
JOHN H. GERSTNER
Cult Study
The Theology of the Major Sects, by John Gerstner (Baker, 1960, 188 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Walter Martin, Director, Christian Research Institute, Inc.
With the evident acceleration of the missionary activities of non-Christian cults, many persons are now showing an interest in this needy field. The latest to procure literature on the subject is Professor of Church History and Government at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, John Gerstner.
In 120 pages, Dr. Gerstner condenses the opinions, observations, and research of almost everyone who has written in the field for the last 50 years. The book contains a glossary of some of the terms utilized by the major cults, an appendix showing some of the doctrines of the cults compared with historic Christianity, and a chart of the doctrines of the sects similar to the old “Spirit of Truth and Spirit of Error” publication still in circulation. Dr. Gerstner has appended to this a selected bibliography.
According to the author, the volume was designed as a “handbook to provide ready reference material—a quick guide to the wealth of literature which expounds this subject.” The reviewer believes that he should have substituted the word “confuses” for “expounds,” for he would have been closer to the truth of the matter.
The fact is that about 80 per cent of the literature in this field is either outdated, inaccurate, or so lacking in trained research as to render it confusing and largely worthless as a means either of evangelizing cultists or refuting them. Dr. Gerstner has indeed compiled a great deal of information, but one wonders whether he has done actual field work of any scope among the cults and the cultists. The book does not convey that impression, and unfortunately it misrepresents the views of some of the people it purports to understand.
In his chapter on Seventh-day Adventism, for example, Dr. Gerstner accuses them of holding views they have publicly rejected concerning the “sinful nature” of Christ. He quotes a book from which the very statement he uses was expunged 15 years ago, and also quotes the 1957 yearbook as “their latest official statement.” He totally ignores Questions on Doctrine, the authorized expansion of the statement which repeatedly affirms the sinlessness of Christ’s nature (appendix, p. 127). Apparently, in this instance, as in others where he misrepresents the Adventists, he has not read carefully what they have claimed.
On the whole Dr. Gerstner’s book betrays the same weakness as Van Baalen’s (to which he frequently refers) and a majority of others (excepting Bach and Braden). He relies chiefly upon reading sources and apparently neglects fundamental research, methodology, and field works. The missionary infiltration of the cults on foreign fields is not covered nor are the methods of the cults.
It is the reviewer’s opinion that Dr. Gerstner’s abstract of the research of others, garnished by a glossary and an all-too-brief textual refutation, complemented by an appendix given to repetition, reveals unfamiliarity with the basic issues of cult activities, methods and theological intricacies.
The book indeed joins “a wealth of literature,” but it contributes little that is new in approach or content, and the author has sometimes relied upon sources which are, to say the least, questionable.
As a recommended text, it ranks with Van Baalen’s Chaos of Cults. To those unitiated in the field, it will prove useful on an introductory level, but as a serious study or analysis it is limited in its scope and understanding of a complex and growing field.
WALTER MARTIN
Reference Work
Atlas of the Classical World, edited by A. A. M. Van der Heyden and H. H. Scullard (Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1960, 221 pp., $15), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry.
Alongside the Atlas of the Bible (1956) and the Atlas of the Early Christian World (1958), the publishers have now issued the Atlas of the Classical World dealing with pagan antiquity. This is a prime reference work—73 maps in color, 475 photographs (many of them new), a concise text, and 24 pages of index.
CARL F. H. HENRY
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This book is the second in the group of historical books (Joshua—II Kings) which are called by the Jews the Former Prophets and which cover the period from the death of Moses to the Babylonian Captivity. Of these books, Joshua, Judges, and I Samuel differ from the others in one important respect, namely, that they are, except for Ruth, the only books which cover the period of their allotment. The historical narrative in I Chronicles begins abruptly with the death of Saul at the hands of the Philistines (10:1).
Judges covers the period from the death of Joshua to the birth of Samuel. The name “Judges,” given it in the Septuagint version, is appropriate because the book deals mainly with the activities of certain “judges” (2:16), nine of whom are stated to have “judged” Israel. Since the book is largely biographical, analysis of it is fairly simple.
CONTENT OF THE BOOK
I. General Situation (1–2:6). The opening chapter plus the first six verses of the next are to be studied in the light of Joshua 13:1–6, 13; 15:63; 16:10; 17:12 f., which state that the conquest was not completed by Joshua.
II. Viewpoint and Aim (2:7–3:4). In these verses the writer tells us that the history he describes runs in cycles: obedience, apostasy, punishment, repentance, forgiveness, deliverance, rest. This sequence of events occurs again and again. The writer proceeds to illustrate it in detail in the record of the 12 judgeships, 12 because Barak is only mentioned with Deborah while Abimelech is not called a judge and his brief career is merely a sequel to that of his father Gideon.
III. The Judges (3:5–16:31). In the main section of the book, we read of the judges, six (Shamgar, Tola, Jair, Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon) of which are called “minor” because so little is told about them although they are assigned a total of 62 years.
The other six are called major judges. Othniel, Caleb’s younger brother, delivered Israel from the most distant of her oppressors, Chushan-rishathaim of Mesopotamia (Aram Naharaim), who may have been an Amorite or an Aramaean. Ebud acquired his fame by assassinating Eglon and delivering Israel from servitude to Moab. Deborah, the prophetess, summoned Barak to battle against Sisera, and their mighty paean of victory is recorded. But the three of whom we read most are Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson, three heroic and tragic figures, very human, very different, yet all three called and used of God to “judge” Israel.
Gideon, the son of a well-to-do Baal-worshiping Israelite, earned the name Jerubbaal (let Baal defend himself) because his father refused to punish him for destroying the Baal altar. (His victory over the Midianites with 300 men who had “pitchers and torches and trumpets to blow” has thrilled the hearts of multitudes of children.) The men of Ephraim quarreled with Gideon and the princes of Succoth refused their aid which were incidents suggesting the antagonisms and jealousies of the tribes of Israel in those days. Gideon’s success led to a lapse into idolatry which was contagious; however, he refused the offer of kingship with the noble words, “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you.” His words were falsified in part by his son’s ambition, for Abimelech, son of a concubine of Shechem, cut a bloody path to the throne of Shechem by slaying his 70 brethren. After a brief reign Abimelech perished at the hand of a woman.
Jephthah was a “self-made” man, a kind of Robin Hood. Called to deliver Israel from the Ammonites, he triumphed as Gideon had done. But as in the case of Gideon, his victory brought him into conflict with the Ephraimites who lost 42,000 men in a struggle that gave the word shibboleth historic significance (12:6). The tragedy of his life rested in his rash vow. Whether he actually sacrificed his daughter has been questioned, but the rather cryptic language of the narrative seems to imply that he did.
Samson, the only judge whose birth (as later that of Samuel) was heralded by an angelic messenger, was a Nazirite who loved and married a Philistine woman. We are told that the marriage “was of the Lord,” who makes even the wrath of men to praise him, and in this case the purpose was to make Samson the inveterate foe of the Philistines. Samson used his great strength to perform mighty exploits, but he was not truly a heroic figure. He allowed himself to be ensnared by a woman’s wiles, learned a bitter lesson, but in his death he destroyed more of his enemies than he did in his lifetime.
IV. Two Appendices (17:1–21:25). The first appendix concerns the story of Micah and the Danites which describes and brings together two incidents which we may regard as typical of an age when “there was no king in Israel.” Micah, an Ephraimite, made a graven image and secured the services of an adventure-seeking Levite to act as his priest. A band of Danite spies, in search of a home, discovered Micah’s shrine, and, when re-enforced by a larger body which they passed by on their way to seize Laish, they offered to make the “hedge priest” the priest of “a tribe and a family in Israel.” They took him and his idolatrous paraphernalia with them, smote Laish with the edge of the sword, and dwelt there (cf. Josh. 19:47). According to 18:30 this event took place in the days of a grandson of Moses (Manasseh stands for Moses). The phrase “until the day of the captivity of the land” is not clear; some believe it refers to the destruction of Shiloh by the Philistines while others connect it to the invasion of Tiglath-Pileser III in the eighth century B.C.
The second appendix concerns the Levite’s concubine and the near annihilation of Benjamin. This appendix is even more damning than the first. A Levite in search of his run-away concubine returned with her by way of Gibeah of Benjamin. There the sin of Sodom was re-enacted. The Benjamites refused to punish the offenders and even rallied to their defense. As a result the tribe was all but exterminated. We are told also that the tragedy occurred because there was no king in Israel. This story explains why Saul could say to Samuel, “Am I not a Benjamite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel?” (1 Sam. 9:21). For through this deed of infamy, Benjamin was reduced from 45,600 men at the time of the Conquest to 600 for whom wives had to be provided from the other tribes. No wonder the story and the book end not merely with the words “there was no king in Israel” but with a final word, “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” The statement is a fitting ending for a tragic book.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOK
The chronology of Judges presents many problems. According to 1 Kings 6:1, the interval between the Exodus (Exod. 12:41) and the fourth year of Solomon’s reign was 480 years. If we add up the figures for judgeships, oppressions, and rests as they are given from time to time, the total is 410 years. Since the total does not include the years of Wandering, the judgeships of Eli and Samuel, or the reigns of Saul and David (which would require considerably more than a century), it is clear that the 410 years must include some overlappings. This solution is favored by the fact that the activities of these leaders, as described in Judges, concerned different parts of the land. Ehud battled with Moab, Gideon with Midian, Jephthah with Ammon, and Samson with the Philistines. We note also that these judges came from different tribes and localities—Othniel from Judah, Tola from Issachar, Ibzan from Bethlehem, Elon from Zebulon, and Samson from Dan. The facts seem to indicate that some of the judgeships were contemporaneous, which would reduce the 410 years considerably. Keil, for example, reduces it to 339 years. John Bright reduces it to about 180 years. If the late date of the Exodus is accepted, the extent of the period of the Judges must be correspondingly curtailed.
Archaeology has thrown light upon the book of Judges. Hazor (4:2), which was discovered by Garstang in 1926, has been recently excavated and proved to have been a great Canaanite city which was apparently made by the Hyksos as a fortress and an armed camp. Its excavator, Yigael Yadin of the Hebrew University, calls it “the city that Joshua sacked and Solomon rebuilt.” It is particularly noted that Joshua burned Hazor with fire (Josh. 11:11). Its importance is indicated by the fact that it is called “the head of all those kingdoms” (v. 10). Its king must be a different Jabin from the Jabin slain by Joshua. Especially interesting and significant is the statement in 8:14 that a young man of Succoth “wrote” (not “described,” AV) for Gideon the name of the 77 princes and elders of Succoth. The statement illustrates what is now known to be a fact that alphabetic writing was widely used in this period.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BOOK
In some respects Judges is a pivotal book in the Old Testament. We have seen that the main section of the book is preceded by a brief summary of the condition of Israel in the period to be described, a condition that was due to the passing away of the generation which had “seen all the great works of the Lord that he did for Israel” and the arising of another generation “which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.” It is pointed out that the younger generation was forsaking the Lord God of their fathers, and going to polytheism, idolatry, and lawlessness. The departure is referred to repeatedly, and the reader is expected to judge the record which the writer proceeds to give. The entire story is one of repeated departures from a higher standard of morality and religion. The words “the great works” which the Lord did for Israel clearly mean the deliverance from Egypt, the covenant and the giving of the law at Sinai, and the conquest of the land as set forth in the Pentateuch and Joshua. In Judges we have the candid recital of repeated apostasies from a former higher standard, the terrible consequences which followed, and the steps by which the people were delivered.
For a century and a half a radically different view of Israel’s history has been gaining popularity. First proposed by De Wette in 1805, the view is that Deuteronomy is not Mosaic but belongs to the time of Josiah (c. 622 B.C.), that it, or part of it, was “the book of the law” discovered by Hilkiah (2 Kings 22:8) and made the basis for a reform which required the centralization of worship at the temple of Jerusalem (cf. “Deuteronomy” in Bible Book of the Month, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 7, 1958, p. 37).
Support for the late dating is found in the obviously close resemblance between the teaching of Deuteronomy and that of the great prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. A major objection to the view, in addition to the plain affirmation in Deuteronomy of its Mosaic character, is that the historical books (Joshua—Kings) describe the history of the period they cover in the very terms which Deuteronomy predicts, namely, in terms of frequent departure from the law of Sinai. Consequently it became necessary for those who regard Deuteronomy as late to insist that the historical books were compiled and edited in “Deuteronomistic” circles. So critical scholars are accustomed to speak of Joshua-Kings as the “Deuteronomistic history,” which means that this great group of history books estimates the history which it records in terms of the ideas and standards of a far later period. To illustrate the point, I refer to a higher critical handling of Joshua 22, the story of the witness altar which the leaders of two and a half tribes declared emphatically was not intended to be a place of sacrifice. Critics themselves admitted that the altar would have been a “rebellion” or “transgression”: the law of the “central sanctuary” was instituted by Moses. So the advocates of the theory are obliged to treat Joshua 22 as “Deuteronomistic,” or even as “priestly” which places it still later in time. The stories, therefore, which describe actual conditions in the time of the Judges are, according to these scholars, set in a Deuteronomic framework which mistakenly represents them as apostasy from a standard introduced centuries later.
A prominent advocate of the above theory, Johannes Pedersen, said: “The strange thing, then, is that Israel in an essential degree came to deny her real history.” To us the even stranger thing is that for a century and a half critics of the Bible have been insistent in forcing on the Old Testament a theory which is so opposed to its own statements and viewpoint.
The book of Judges has a lesson which the present generation of Christians greatly needs. We are learning today at heavy cost that the failure of even a single generation to pass on to its successor its own precious heritage of faith and morals will have tragic results. The godlessness and delinquency in present day America is largely the result of the breakdown of Christian nurture in our homes, schools, and churches. It does not take long to train up a generation of whom it can be said, “and there arose another generation after them which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.” The Communists in Russia and in China are strenuously engaged in the task of bringing into being a new generation which knows nothing of its past, which is a stranger to the culture which went before it. In other places, no such special training of the young people is needed. Let the children alone, leave them without discipline, allow them to “develop naturally,” we say, which is the basic idea in “progressive education”; and when they grow up it will be said of them, “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Christian example, Christian education, Christian nurture, are the supreme need today if Christianity is to meet triumphantly the forces of evil which challenge its very existence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The recently published Keil and Delitzsch Commentary is still one of the best expositions of the biblical text. The results of archaeological research are given in Garstang’s The Foundations of Bible History (1931) and more recently in Unger’s Archaeology of the Old Testament, and Free’s Archaeology and Bible History. Other sources are The Biblical Archaeologist and the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The critical interpretation of Judges is given in G. F. Moore’s treatise in The International Critical Commentary, by C. F. Burney in The Book of Judges, and also in the Introductions of S. R. Driver and of R. H. Pfeiffer. Other books which might be mentioned are H. H. Rowley From Joseph to Joshua, G. E. Wright Archaeology of the Bible, and the Rand-McNally Bible Atlas by Emil G. Kraeling.
OSWALD T. ALLIS
Wayne, Pennsylvania
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A daring gesture of ecumenical initiative came this month in an announcement from Lambeth Palace:
Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, titular head of the world Anglican communion, had succeeded in arranging an early December audience with Pope John XXIII.
Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury and primate of the Church of England, will call on the pontiff as the climax of an 11-day, 4,671-mile tour in the interests of ecumenicity. He plans to arrive in Rome December 1, after visits to Orthodox patriarchs in Jerusalem and Istanbul.
Vatican and Anglican spokesmen decried the “summitry” image which quickly developed around the projected encounter, stressing instead “courtesy call” and “fellowship” aspects. Not even an agenda would be drawn up, they said.
While no revolutionary compromises are expected to result from the meeting, many observers nevertheless believe it almost certain that church unity will be a chief topic of discussion between the two churchmen.
There was immediate speculation of what effect the talks would have upon Roman Catholicism’s forthcoming Ecumenical Council.
The meeting “may have incalculable consequences in the years to come,” says the Rev. Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., American Episcopal bishop who is now considered the world’s second-ranking Anglican as executive officer under Fisher.
Although Fisher is a former president of the World Council of Churches, Bayne denied that the papal visit will amount to a “religious summit meeting.” He did say that it is in response to “a change in the climate of the Vatican” which “can’t help but be encouraging to anyone who stops to think about it.”
Bayne cited establishment in Rome of a secretariat for contact with non-Roman churches, calling it “essentially a recognition of the World Council of Churches” and “a door between the Vatican and the World Council.”
Fisher’s itinerary called for him to leave London November 22. What amounted to an official sendoff was given by William Cardinal Godfrey, Roman Catholic Archbishop of London, at a luncheon and evening reception November 10 in London.
Fisher will fly first to Jerusalem where he will meet with Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Benedictos, Latin (Roman Catholic) Patriarch Albert Gori, O. F. M., and Armenian Patriarch Elishe Derderian.
During his stay he will be the guest of the Anglican archbishop in Jerusalem, the Most Rev. Campbell Maclnnes. Visits are planned to various historic Holy Land sites such as the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, and Jacob’s well in Samaria.
From Jerusalem the Anglican primate will fly to Istanbul to call on Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I, who ranks as first among equals of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs. The visit to Istanbul will occur on the Feast of St. Andrew, the patronal festival of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Fisher plans to attend the divine liturgy in the patriarchal chapel.
The visit to Rome will climax the tour. Here Fisher will be hosted for three days by Sir Peter Scarlett, Her Majesty’s minister to the Holy See, before heading back to London December 3.
As for the protocol of Fisher’s call on the Pope, sources close to the archbishop insist that the two will be meeting as equals, and there will be no ring kiss. One observer predicted “a minimum of formality and a maximum of courtesy.” Fisher is said to favor addressing the Pope as “your holiness” and “your grace.” They will meet alone except for two interpreters.
Rome Radio said it had learned from Vatican sources that the Pope will disregard an ancient Vatican custom of suspending all papal audiences in the first week of Advent when the meeting is scheduled.
Fisher has stressed that he himself had proposed the papal visit. The idea grew out of Pope John’s demonstrated interest in an enlarged fellowship with non-Romanists (he has not yet specified his conditions for such fellowship). The pontiff dispatched the head of his new liaison secretariat, Msgr. Jan G. M. Willebrands, as an observer to the World Council of Churches Central Committee meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland, last summer.
Willebrands had a long talk with Fisher and indicated that Pope John would favor a face-to-face meeting.
Reflecting upon his proposed trip, Fisher says:
“No previous archbishop could have proposed such a visit as this without the certainty of insuperable misunderstandings. The fact that I could do so is due to the steadily changing climate of thought among all the churches. It is due, finally, to the initiative openly taken by the Pope to make clear that the Roman Catholic church desires better relations with other churches and not least, and expressly, with the Church of England and its sister churches.”
“… What my proposed visit to the Pope has established, I hope, is that in the future Anglicans, Roman Catholics and others can talk together freely and openly in a spirit of Christian friendship and fellowship, not seeking victory over one another but as fellow disciples in the service of one Lord—learning as Christians always must learn, first by talking with one another and speaking the truth as they see it in love.”
The Ecumenist
Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, 73, has been Archbishop of Canterbury since 1945. Prior to his elevation to the highest Anglican office he served as a bishop in London and Chester and, for 18 years, as headmaster of a school. He has never held a parish.
Fisher was the tenth child of the rector of Higham-on-the-Hill, Nuneaton. He attended school at Marlborough, then won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he took both academic and athletic honors.
He studied for a short time at Wells Theological College and returned to his old school, Marlborough, as an assistant master. He was only 27 when he succeeded William Temple as headmaster of Repton. Temple later became Archbishop of Canterbury and Fisher succeeded him to that office as well.
Fisher’s first public statement after becoming archbishop was an appeal for ending of color bars throughout the British Commonwealth. He has been regarded as an outspoken churchman ever since.
Early this month he openly reprimanded Dr. John Arthur Thomas Robinson, Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, who had testified at a trial in defense of the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Robinson told the court he thought author D. H. Lawrence had tried to portray sex relations as something sacred and in a real sense as an act of holy communion. He said Christians ought to read the book.
Fisher, addressing the Canterbury Diocesan Conference, said Robinson had a full right to appear as a witness on a point of law, but to do so was obviously bound “to cause confusion in many people’s minds between his individual right of judgment and the discharge of his pastoral duties.”
The trial ended with the jury ruling that the novel was not obscene.
A public rebuke of this kind is very rare in the Church of England. In 1927, Dr. Ernest William Barnes, the then Bishop of Birmingham, was rebuked by Dr. Randall T. Davidson, then Archbishop of Canterbury, for views publicly voiced, particularly on sacramental doctrine.
Fisher is the 100th head of an archdiocese that was formerly Roman Catholic, but for 400 years has been the primatial see of the Anglican community.
Canterbury To Rome: The Visit In Perspective
The news that Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, is to visit the Pope in Rome next month has occasioned widespread comment. On the whole the reaction has been one of restrained approval. It is felt that in our world as it is today the opening of doors of communication can only be a good thing, provided there is no compromise on matters of principle. The projected visit seems to be an outcome of the interest which the Roman Catholic church is now beginning to show in the ecumenical movement. This in itself is a new factor and cannot fail to be creative in some measure of a new situation. Thus two Roman Catholic observers were present at the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches held in St. Andrews, Scotland, in August, and one of them. Monsignor Willebrands, has been appointed head of the new secretariat for Christian unity which Pope John has set up.
It has been emphasized that this will be no more than a courtesy visit and that there will be no agenda of things to be discussed. To imagine that it can be limited to an act of courtesy is, however, somewhat naive. “The visit cannot be treated merely as an act of courtesy,” comments the London Daily Telegraph. “It marks, in fact, an awareness in both communions, sharpened no doubt by the increased power of the anti-Christian Communist philosophy, that disunity among Christians is too great a scandal to be ignored and too serious a weakness to be left unremedied.”
An editorial in the Church of England Newspaper (published weekly in London) is to the point. “It is not inopportune for members of the Church of England to remind themselves,” it says, “that the position of the Church of England vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church is clearly defined in the Thirty-nine Articles.… The Archbishop of Canterbury—and here we speak, we trust, with entire courtesy—will stand before the Pope as representing a Church which says quite clearly: ‘As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.’” This will be the first time that an Archbishop of Canterbury has visited the Pope since before the Reformation. Thomas Cranmer, however, did journey to Rome and met the Pope in 1530—two years before he became Archbishop of Canterbury. The occasion was a deputation, led by the Earl of Wiltshire, in connection with the matter of the King of England’s divorce. Foxe describes how, when the Pope preferred his toe to be kissed, members of the delegation maintained an unbending dignity and refused to engage in any such act of obeisance. The Earl of Wiltshire’s spaniel, however, unaffected by inhibitions of this kind, moved forward and seized the sacred toe with his teeth, whereupon his holiness hastily withdrew it under the shelter of his robes. Beyond all doubt the present Archbishop of Canterbury will observe a like gravity and refrain from any act of obeisance to the Roman pontiff—though it is not suggested that he should take a spaniel dog along with him!
P.E.H.
The Last Enemy
Death has taken several well-known religious figures in recent weeks.
Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, noted Bible expositor and editor-in-chief of Eternity magazine, died November 4 in Philadelphia. He had been confined to Temple University Hospital for a month following surgery for a malignant brain tumor.
Barnhouse, 65, was minister of the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for the last 33 years. His radio voice was known to millions.
Associates say adjustments will be made to enable the Barnhouse ministries to continue. His “Bible Study Hour,” heard over the National Broadcasting Company network, is recorded through next Easter.
Barnhouse’s death in Philadelphia preceded by a day a private funeral service in the same city for another noted evangelical personality.
Dr. Percy B. Crawford, television-radio evangelist and Christian youth leader, died of a heart ailment October 31 in a Trenton, New Jersey, hospital.
The 58-year-old Crawford was taken to the hospital two days earlier when he collapsed at a roadside restaurant while en route to a church speaking engagement. He had suffered six previous heart attacks in the last two years.
The day following the private funeral service, a public memorial service was conducted by evangelist Billy Graham in Philadelphia’s Town Hall. Crawford is survived by his wife, four sons aged 16 to 24, and a daughter, 11.
He was founder-president of King’s College and originator of the “Young People’s Church of the Air” radio broadcast and the “Youth on the March” telecast. His organization recently began operation of a television channel of its own in Philadelphia. He also operated summer camps in the Pennsylvania Poconos. Attempts will be made to carry on many of these enterprises.
Dr. Halford E. Luccock, 75, died November 5 in New Haven, Connecticut, after a short illness.
Luccock, professor emeritus of preaching at Yale Divinity School, had written, under the pseudonym of Simeon Stylites, a column for The Christian Century since 1948.
The son of a Methodist bishop, Luccock was ordained into the Methodist Episcopal ministry in 1910.
He was the author of some 25 books, mostly about religion and literature. He taught at Yale for 25 years, retiring in 1953. He had lived in Connecticut.
John James Allan, top-ranking Salvation Army leader and a founder of United Service Organizations (better known to U. S. servicemen as the USO), died October 31 in Clearwater, Florida, at the age of 73.
Allan helped found the USO in 1940 while serving as assistant chief of chaplains in the U. S. Army. In 1946 he went to the international headquarters of the Salvation Army in London. He was the highest U. S.-born Salvation Army officer in the organization’s history.
Membership Loss
The Evangelical United Brethren denomination recorded a net loss of 1,522 members during the last year, according to newly-released figures from the church’s international headquarters in Dayton, Ohio.
Current membership in 4,418 organized congregations in the United States was given as 761,858.
Dr. Paul W. Milhouse, church statistician, attributed the loss chiefly to the mass movement of the population toward metropolitan centers. The EUB church has historically stressed a ministry to rural areas and small towns.
The membership loss is the first since 1946 when a union was consummated between the Evangelical Church and the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
POAU on Kennedy
President-elect Kennedy can count on the “strong support” of Protestants and Other Americans United in his support of Church-State separation.
“Although Kennedy’s position is not that of the bishops of his church,” says Glenn L. Archer, POAU executive director, “we believe that the majority of the Catholic people of the United States agree with him, and we look forward to an administration in which the new president will faithfully adhere to the pledge of Church-State separation which he gave so solemnly. We hope to provide strong support for Mr. Kennedy in his endeavors to support this principle.”
Needed: Higher Incentive
Despite the incentive of a 30 per cent deduction allowable against taxable income, Americans channel relatively little of their ample means toward religious, educational, and social welfare activities.
Only 1.36 per cent of all personal consumption expenditures fell into the “religious and welfare activities” category last year, according to the U. S. Department of Commerce. The department arrives at the “religious and welfare activities” figure by totalling operating expenses, including depreciation, of all religious and social welfare (ex. Red Cross, Community Chest) organizations.
Protestant Panorama
• Witness, service, and unity will be sub-themes of the Third World Council of Churches Assembly in New Delhi, India, next fall. Main theme is “Jesus Christ—the Light of the World.” Some 1,000 church and lay leaders will participate. About two-thirds this number will be official delegates of member churches.
• The Presbytery of Tasmania will ask its General Assembly to endorse state aid to church schools. An article in the presbytery’s journal, Presbyterian Life, stresses that such assistance must take the “form of capital grants, administered by a formula that would preclude disproportionate aid to any denomination and allow no measure of state control.”
• Testimony began in a New York federal court this month in a suit to block merger of the Congregational Christian Churches’ General Council and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Seeking to nullify the “basis of union” for the new United Church of Christ are four Congregational churches and 10 individuals.
• Dr. J. W. W. Shuler, 100-year-old Methodist minister, marked the start of his second century by preaching a sermon at the First Methodist Church in Hillsboro, Texas. Shuler, who came to Texas from the East almost 50 years ago in search of drier climate for his health, still preaches regularly, does 17 rounds of calisthenics every morning, eats heartily, and works his own garden.
• Southern Presbyterians are redesigning their Christian education program. A new “Covenant Life Curriculum” to be ready for use in the fall of 1964 is aimed at eventually replacing the “Uniform Lessons” and “Graded Materials” series.
• Church of the Nazarene congregations are conducting a “Try Christ’s Way” crusade this month. Evangelism secretary Edward Lawlor says the crusade (“most intensive effort to reach people on a denominational scale in the history of our church”) calls upon each member to establish a witness with seven people and to invite each to attend church.
• Whereas 35 years ago Christian thought was most seriously challenged by the natural sciences, the crucial problem today is philosophy, according to Dr. J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., president of Covenant Seminary, who addressed the seventh annual philosophy conference at Wheaton College this month.
• Anglicans consecrated their first native-born bishop in the Pacific Islands last month. He is the Rev. George Ambo, 37, born in New Guinea and educated in mission schools. At consecration ceremonies in a Brisbane, Australia, cathedral, Ambo was made assistant bishop of New Guinea.
• Fire destroyed a men’s dormitory at Clarke Memorial College, a Baptist school in Newton, Mississippi, this month. About half the students lost all their clothing, but none were seriously injured.
• The Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges admitted three new associate members at an annual meeting in Chicago last month: Atlanta (Georgia) Christian College; Appalachian Bible Institute, Bradley, West Virginia; and Canadian Bible College, Regina, Saskatchewan.
• The Holy Ghost Church of Dalby, Sweden, oldest stone house of worship in Scandinavia, was rededicated last month after a thorough renovation. Although its exact age is not known, the church is mentioned in a document as early as 1060.
• The Hymn Society of America is sponsoring a contest for compositions which have as their theme aspects of Christian marriage and family life. The contest is open to all composers and musicians in the United States and Canada. Deadline for submission is February 15, 1961.
• It took the state court of appeals to settle a dispute over use of instrumental music in the Church of Christ at Virgie, Kentucky. The court ruled that a group in the church which favored the music was the majority group and was entitled to exclusive use of the church property.
Monkey Tricks
From the opening moments, when a contralto voice is heard singing repeatedly “Give me the old-time religion; it’s good enough for me,” the United Artists film “Inherit the Wind,” purporting to reproduce the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, is drastically loaded against the Christian religion. A more deplorable caricature of sacred things would be difficult to imagine: an unloving and unlovable cleric savagely and publicly consigning his only daughter to the direst torments of hell because of her unwillingness to renounce her love for the young schoolteacher who has been put on trial for teaching Darwinism in the classroom; the jaunty irreverence of Gene Kelly acting the part of famed reporter H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun; the portrayal by Frederic March of William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the prosecution, as a stupid, gluttonous egotist; and the chunky performance of Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow, counsel for the defense, who is made the real hero of the film and steals its thunder—all these (the names of the actual persons involved in 1925 are changed), together with the oppressive blanket of hysterical obscurantism in which it is wrapped up and handed to the public, combine to make this a film which will do more to travesty the Christian faith than a hundred books advocating atheism.
The film is now playing in theaters across the United States.
Stanley Kramer produced and directed the film from the popular stage drama by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.
All that remains to be said is that if the moronic mob depicted on the screen is typical of American small town citizenry, and if the Tracy-March duo are supposed to reproduce the rhetorical heights of American advocacy, heaven preserve us. Bathos pervades the whole, not least when, with studied symbolism, Tracy leaves the deserted courtroom with two books—Darwin and the Bible—under his arm, after he has shed gallons of perspiration in an attempt to prove that the one is incompatible with the other. It may be as well to remember that there are scientists as well as Christians who repudiate Darwinism, and that obscurantism, so far from being the preserve of particular religious pockets, is not unknown in scientific circles. Because of its double-thickness bias this film inverts and drapes itself with the obscurantism which it is intent on exposing, and merits an “oscar” for its services in the noble cause of prejudice.
P.E.H.
30-Year Ordeal
Mrs. Katherine Voronaeff, 73-year-old wife of a Russian-born Assemblies of God missionary, is now living in the United States after spending most of the last 30 years in Soviet prisons. Whereabouts of the husband, the Rev. John E. Voronaeff, also a victim of Communist imprisonment, are unknown.
Mrs. Voronaeff was freed from prison in 1953, but it took seven more years of negotiations between the Kremlin and the U. S. State Department to enable her to join her six children in America. She expects to spend the next several months with a son in Los Angeles.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Voronaeff were born in Russia, but emigrated to the United States in their youth and even took out citizenship papers. In the interests of evangelizing their own people, however, the couple went back under sponsorship of the Assemblies of God Foreign Missions Department. Voronaeff became chairman of the denomination’s work in Russia and experienced a fruitful ministry. The work came to a sudden halt when, on a cold winter night in 1930, 800 pastors were rounded up, imprisoned and subsequently shipped to Siberia.
For three years Mrs. Voronaeff tried secretly to carry on her husband’s work. Then she, too, was arrested and placed in prison.
When the couple was released in 1940, the Assemblies of God raised funds for their return to the United States. But when the pastor approached the Soviet government to sign the necessary papers, he was re-arrested and returned to Siberia. He has not been heard from since.
Clergy Strain
Clergymen are more prone to emotional stress and strain than laymen, according to an exhaustive study made at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The study shows ministers to have a significantly higher incidence of diseases where emotional factors are known to be important.
In a comparison of case histories of 1,000 ministers who have been patients at the hospital, 20 per cent gave evidence of relationship between vocation and illness. Ministers were found to be more susceptible to illness between the ages of 30 and 40.
The study was compiled by Dr. Albert L. Meiburg, director of research for the hospital’s department of pastoral care, in collaboration with Dr. Richard K. Young, head of the department.
Auca Film
Selected evangelical groups are previewing a 35-minute sound film which traces attempts to bring the Gospel to Ecuador’s savage Auca Indians.
Included are sequences taken during the period when five young missionaries were killed by the Aucas nearly five years ago.
Mrs. Elisabeth Elliot, one of the five widows of the slayings, narrates the film. The film is said to have been produced under her direction. She is now back in South America. No distributor has been named.
Tokyo Crusade
Dr. Oswald J. Smith, founder of Toronto’s People Church, conducted a week-long evangelistic campaign in Tokyo last month.
A spokesman for Smith said the meetings, held under the auspices of nearly 100 evangelical churches and pastors, represented the first united evangelistic campaign ever held in the world’s largest city.
The 2,200-seat Kyoritz Hall proved inadequate for the large crowds. A total of 796 made first-time professions of salvation. They were counselled by some 400 Navigators-trained nationals.
A large choir and a Salvation Anny band provided music for the services.
The Kyoritz Hall meetings were held in the evening. In addition, afternoon services were conducted in a Salvation Army hall.
Yoji Iwashiga was Smith’s interpreter for the crusade. All expenses were met by Japanese churches.
Evangelism in Brussels
By November 6, when the climactic closing service drew an overflow crowd of 2,500 to Brussels’ famed Albert Hall, it was clear that British Evangelist Eric Hutchings’ 23-day crusade had written a new chapter in the history of Belgian Protestantism.
Total impact warmed the hearts of Belgian Protestants, who make up scarcely one per cent of the population.
An aggregate of some 25,000 attended crusade meetings.
Reported Le Soir, Brussels largest daily, “It is the first time in the history of Protestantism in Brussels that meetings have been organized on such a scale.”
Sixteen ministers representing eight Protestant denominations sponsored the visit of Hutchings, who some years ago gave up a law practice to preach.
At each service the evangelist asked members of the audience to step forward to indicate new faith in Christ. A total of about 400 responded.
“Not since Reformation days,” said one observer, “had Brussels seen so many at the altar rail.”
A 175-member choir sang nightly. Hutchings’ sermons were interpreted into Flemish, German, and Russian via earphones.
The Rev. Walter W. Marichal, president of the Brussels Ministerial Association, served as crusade chairman.
Missions Vacancies
The Southern Baptist Home Mission Board says it has an immediate, urgent need for 270 personnel.
“There are mission centers which cannot be opened until missionaries are provided,” stated Glendon McCullough, personnel secretary for the board. “We have vacancies in Spanish work that have not been filled in two years because there are no qualified mission applicants.”
Petition Denial
The U. S. Supreme Court denied without an opinion last month a petition from the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America for a rehearing on the question of ownership of St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral, New York.
Control of the cathedral, in dispute since 1924, was given to the Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church in the United States by the Supreme Court last June in an unanimous opinion.
At that time the court held that Archbishop Boris, appointee of the Moscow Patriarchate as head of the Patriarchal Church in this country, and his supporters have the right to possession and control of the cathedral.
The controversy over which faction owned the edifice started 36 years ago when a large majority of clergy and faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church in this country established the autonomous body on the ground that the Moscow Patriarchate had become a tool of an atheist state.
The Supreme Court also refused to review a decision by a Cleveland federal court which rejected a claim by Bishop Andrei Moldovan that he is head of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in America.
Once before in 1954 the high tribunal rejected his appeal from a permanent injunction issued by the federal court forbidding him to represent himself as head of the denomination in this country.
Bishop Moldovan flew secretly to Romania in 1950 where he was consecrated Bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of America by the Holy Synod in Bucharest. This action was not recognized by most of the Romanian churches in America which charged that Romanian Communists planned to use their new bishop as a tool in this country.
Subsequently the anti-Moldovan forces elected Bishop Valerian D. Trifa as head of the episcopate which has its headquarters in Jackson, Mich. The episcopate has no canonical ties with the Orthodox Church in Romania.
Catholic Newsmen
A school of journalism for the training of Roman Catholic newspapermen was formally inaugurated in Madrid, Spain, last month by Bishop Pedro Cantero Cuadrado of Huelva. Enrolled for the initial courses were 53 men and 13 women, all university graduates.
The bishop said that the function of the Catholic press was not merely to deal with “confessional subjects, religious art, et cetera” but with everyday themes and problems, giving them a “Christian orientation.”
Pacifist Play
A pacifist-motivated play, which deals with “alternatives to war” through modern drama techniques, and has as its “angel” the American Friends Service Committee, is on a 7,000-mile tour of 30 cities.
It is a followup to a more limited tour last spring which brought favorable audience response and reviews, according to Religious News Service.
The play, “Which Way the Wind,” was written by Philip C. Lewis and adapted to a technique he calls Docu-Drama.
Many of the performances will be in church auditoriums.
Congo Appeal
The World Council of Churches is appealing for $1,000,000 for projects to aid the troubled Congo.
Endorsed this month by the administrative committee of the WCC’s Division of Inter-church Aid and Service to Refugees was an appeal to churches for a broad program of aid ranging from immediate relief to the establishment of secondary school training.
The WCC is also issuing an appeal for East Pakistan where some 6,000 persons died in a recent cyclone.
The WCC refugee committee, which met in Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, also heard a report that churches have contributed $340,361 in cash for victims of earthquakes in Chile. Of this amount, $238,000 came from German churches.
People: Words And Events
Deaths: See “The Last Enemy,” page 27.
Appointments: As president of Phillips University, Dr. Hallie Gantz … as professor of homiletics at Union Theological Seminary, New York, Dr. Edmund A. Steimle … as director of Seamen’s Church Institute, New York, the Rev. John M. Mulligan … as executive secretary of the World Council of Churches Youth Department, the Rev. Roderick S. French.
Elections: As president of the Baptist Theological Seminary in Ruschlikon, Switzerland, Dr. J. D. Hughey, Jr. … as chairman of the Methodist Board of Publication, F. Murray Benson … as warden of the College of Preachers of Washington Cathedral, the Rev. Frederick H. Arterton … as moderator of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, Dr. Max Strang … as chairman of the Christian Business Men’s Committee, International, Alfred R. Jackson … as president of the Presbyterian Men’s Council, Vernol R. Janson … as president of the Christian Writers Association of Canada, the Rev. B. T. Parkinson.
Nomination: As moderator-designate of the Church of Scotland General Assembly, Dr. A. C. Craig.
Consecration: As Anglican Bishop of Auckland, New Zealand, Dr. Eric A. Gowing.
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Last summer’s World Student Christian Federation conference in Strasbourg, France, on the mission of the Church was the culmination of several years’ discussion. Now, half a year later, it is far from forgotten. Afterthoughts are still provoked, particularly over an “ideology” of missions which seemed to float through the conference and its study materials.
One delegate expressed the matter this way: “The ‘ideology’ or presupposition of some of those responsible for the Strasbourg conference might be stated thus: that the present structures and organizations of the church, particularly those of missionary societies and boards, are no longer adequate to meet the challenge of the modern age and enter into a positive, free encounter with a ‘world come of age.’ Expressed more bluntly, the inference seemed to be this: one of the greatest hindrances and stumbling blocks to the mission of the church to the world is foreign missions. The answer: a new concept of ecumenical mission, unhampered by denominationalism, confessionalism, missionary societies, or boards, which would in the freedom of the Holy Spirit discover new forms and patterns for living in an open, dynamic dialogue on the frontiers of the modern world.”
Those who offered this criticism conceded that this mood was a disturbing undertone rather than an avowed policy of the conferees. In fact, over against the idea of any WSCF conspiracy to undermine missions, stands its originally defined missionary raison d’être: “To enlist students in the work of extending the Kingdom of God throughout the whole world.” Over the past decades, however, observers have noted WSCF’s missionary concern to be considerably less than overwhelming. Thus recent signs of awakening interest have been greeted with gratitude by many church leaders. The Strasbourg conference was hailed as the “key event,” a renascence noteworthy in several respects.
Its 700 delegates, leaders, and speakers constituted one of the most “international” assemblies ever conducted under Christian auspices either in Europe or North America. Anglo-Saxon delegates were for once not in the majority, and the leadership was properly in line with this fact. The conference enjoyed the stimulation of speakers like W. A. Visser’t Hooft, D. T. Niles, and Lesslie Newbigin. Incisive questions and discussion followed outstanding lectures. A heavy theological emphasis was guarded from speculative flights by sensitivity to burning issues of our time, e.g., revolution, communism, and resurgent nationalism. Frank exchange was made possible by an underlying sense of unity in Christ even on such combustible issues as between white and black South Africans, Europeans from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Indian and Pakistani, Japanese and Korean, Cuban and American. Representatives came not only from all these areas but also from Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (specifically from “Pax Romana,” an international Romanist student movement). And for the first time, a leader of Inter-Varsity Fellowship played an active role in a WSCF conference.
With all the good qualities of the conference, the thing that proved disturbing to some delegates was the undertone that “the mission of the Church” is to be enhanced by forsaking “missions.” Several of the better study documents indicated that the two concepts are inseparable—that while missions may be only one aspect of the mission of the Church, it is nonetheless an indispensable one. But the former line of thought, novel as it was, manifested itself in several areas to the ear sensitive to misplaced emphases and half-truths.
Salutary was the emphasis upon the Holy Spirit in several lectures. D. T. Niles contended that on the day of Pentecost the Gospel became a Gospel for all nations, so that wherever the Holy Spirit comes into the life of a person he is ipso facto swept into that movement which would take the Gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth. But most references through the conference failed to relate the work of the Holy Spirit to the written Word and to the Church. Consequently, it was assumed that the Holy Spirit “is breaking the finality of inherited structures” and giving us new forms for the mission of the Church. As to how we determine what these new forms are—here there was a great vagueness. But the implication was that the institutional element of the Church was unessential and accidental for the life and mission of the Church.
No one was so rash as to claim dispensability of the Church as the Body of Christ, but it was often assumed that the structures of the Church, the manner of its proclamation, its confessions and use of the Bible, its ministers and missionaries in particular (above all, missionary societies!) are quite dispensable and are in fact a hindrance to the kingdom.
Relation of Church and world was obscure. That this is God’s world was clear enough, but the prince of the power of the air was granted total eclipse. Christian identification with the world was untempered by any reminder of the evil of being “of the world.”
Besides “missions,” other scare words were “confessionalism” and “pietism.” The debilitating influence of the latter was so turgidly portrayed, all the while undefined, that one could be excused for imagining it the paramount threat to the WSCF. Great enthusiasm was roused by the pleas of one speaker for a true “secularism,” flexible new church structures, a “desacralized” church, and a “de-religionized” Christianity. But later discussion revealed general lack of understanding by the students of what the new-coined words involved. But there seemed to be a confused desire for a confessionless, structureless, clergyless, in short a churchless, fellowship—a sort of ecclesiastical docetism.
But the real scandal was “missions,” and more particularly “foreign missions.” In this area was seen in essence the failure of the Church to adjust and free itself for the challenge of our times. WSCF’s General Secretary made a frontal attack on foreign missions in the closing address, suggesting they lack theological validity. Sending agencies are unnecessary and harmful, he said. Missionaries are not to offer themselves but go only when and where requested. “Full time ministries in most parts of the world have become the most serious handicap in evangelism.”
A small faction consisting chiefly of American students (bona fide undergraduate students comprised only about a third of the delegates) called a special meeting for all interested in a new “ecumenical order.” Said a statement: “Since God works, suffers, etc., in the world, we must take the world seriously. But our churches aren’t prepared for dialogue on this level. We are tempted to leave the church, but this is a false alternative, for it is the body of Christ. Yet we want to enter into the world in ‘new patterns of missionary obedience.’ Unfortunately, the church will suspect us of being secularists.” It was added that the World Council of Churches and International Missionary Council had been consulted but there were no possibilities there.
Such thinking found support in two WSCF study outlines, distinguished from the more constructive and balanced lectures and other outlines by a schizophrenia which apparently dogs the WSCF view of missions. One titled “Has Christianity a Future?” spoke of the unreliability of the New Testament and asserted, “It is common opinion today that the Scriptures of all the world’s religions all have a certain value as poetry or as records of mystical experience, but none of them is genuine history.” The pamphlet voiced concern that students still had to study the Christological controversies of the Ecumenical Councils and marvelled at the “arrogance” which makes claims of finality for the Christian religion.
Another study outline exalts the virtues of non-Christian religion and boldly claims: “Western Christians can no longer be sure that they are saving anyone from anything, because heaven and hell are not ‘real’ to them anymore. Anthropologists tell them of the harm that missionaries have done by introducing alien ideas into ancient cultures; psychologists tell them dark stories about the emotional confusion they create; and sociologists reveal that their own Church is often itself a structure of illusions anyway.” “The almost demonic activity which the missionary movement seems to have unleashed” is decried. The missionaries themselves are somewhat excused, for though well-meaning they were blind and “enclosed within their own prejudices.” But the missionary societies are another story. “A great deal of the blame for the present mess we are in” lies with them, it is claimed.
With such enthronement of the negative, the conference failed to fulfill a stated aim: “to recover and communicate to this student generation a new and more adequate understanding of the basic motivation for the mission of the Church and commitment to it.” Preconference literature stressed the importance of history, but this was forgotten in the conference. Renewal of Bible study had been listed as a significant change, but no Bible study was held, to the complaint of many. There was much talk of dialogue, particularly with other religions and the world. But no non-Christian spoke, and the only attempt to hear directly from the world was the presentation of a Sartre drama. On the theological side, some Germans criticized the omission of discussion of the theological revolution embodied in Bultmann. Barth’s visit to Strasbourg was a highlight, but Brunner and Tillich were singularly ignored in discussions.
Nor were mission board secretaries invited to the “dialogue.” Sadly enough, it seemed easier to criticize mistakes of others and turn brightly to vague new patterns for the future.
Greater profit would have been gained by following up lines of discussion suggested in some of the pamphlets: that we should not confuse the mission of the Church with a particular missionary program, thus confusing the purpose with a task; but also that we should not stress the general mission of the Church to the exclusion of concern for specific missionary activities. Needless to say, this danger was not always avoided at Strasbourg.
Challenging and moving as the conference was, it failed to recognize that almost everything it proposed as radical and new had already been discussed and in many ways implemented at and since the IMC world conference of 1952. This again marked the absence of real dialogue. Thus the conference fell rather far short of a hope once expressed by Bishop Newbigin: “Above all I have expressed the hope that our coming to terms with these new facts of our situation [so brilliantly analyzed at Strasbourg] may lead not to a dilution of the missionary passion, but on the contrary to a new clarification of the missionary objective, and a new concentration of the resources of the whole Church upon the unfinished task of making Christ known to all nations as the Saviour of the World.”
Ideas
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Our world today seems far removed from the world of the Bible. What have we, with our nuclear weapons, space satellites, television, and mechanized way of life, in common with an age of chariots and horsemen, and herdsmen, nomads, and primitive tillers of the soil? Has not modern man with his modern civilization and his modern science reduced the Bible to a religious curiosity, virtually prehistoric and definitely prescientific, and therefore outmoded and irrelevant? To ask such questions is legitimate and even necessary; but all too frequently the issue is prejudged by the ignorance or antipathy of those who ask them. To criticize and condemn from a position of ignorance or hostility is not to give the Bible a chance.
The Bible, is indeed, an ancient book, or collection of books, written in times outwardly very different from our own. But this consideration is peripheral. What is central to a proper understanding of the Bible and its message is the recognition that inwardly, at the vital core of his being, man has not altered over the centuries. His deepest needs today are the same as they have ever been. And it is precisely to man as man that the message of the Bible is addressed—and modern man is still man. He cannot cease to be what he is by constitution. Whatever the circumstances of its writing, the Bible in its scope is not limited to times and places long past: it embraces the whole sweep of the history of humanity, in its most radical sense, from beginning to end, from creation to judgment. In its pages man is set in the light of eternity. Is that not revelant to us today?
The Bible proclaims the sovereignty of Almighty God over all the affairs of mankind, as Creator, Sustainer, Judge, and Redeemer. Is not that relevant? It reminds man of the fundamental fact that he is a creature, not self-sufficient, as he would like to imagine himself, but dependent on God and owing him his gratitude and worship. It may come as a surprise to its critics to know that the Bible in fact sees man as essentially scientific man, endowed with capacities that make him unique in the created order, and formed to subdue the world and have dominion over it. The modern man of science is, however, no surprise to the Bible.
But at the same time, and with unerring penetration, the Bible sees man as fallen man—frustrated at the very heart of his being because of his alienation from God through the mutiny of sin. The Bible is a veritable mirror of man, the supreme and original textbook of depth-psychology, which reveals man to himself as he really is in his inmost essence.
Yet further—and this is its central message to us—the Bible tells how God has acted in Christ so that men may be reconciled to God and to each other. In penetrating to the root of every man’s deepest and most desperate need, it also points to the remedy, the way out of the dilemma. In Christ he rediscovers his true manhood. If one thing is obvious, it is that, despite all the wonderful advances of knowledge and science, our contemporary world is in need of reintegration and reconciliation.
Instead of scorning the message of the Bible, let the skeptic consider whether the scientific American airman, who had been on a mission of mass destruction, found this Book irrelevant when, beaten, starving, and in solitary confinement in enemy hands (a situation symbolical, one might suggest, of the anguish which is characteristic of the spiritual plight of modern man), the reading of it made him wise to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus, and replaced the hatred and bitterness of his heart with overflowing love, joy, and peace. Is there no relevance to the contemporary problems of our world in the fact that this man has now returned to the Japanese whom he formerly hated with the Bible’s message of reconciliation through Christ?
It may be asked: How does the state of our world today harmonize with the biblical doctrine of the sovereignty of God? Are not the strifes and tensions between nations and the increase of violence and crime a contradiction of the divine sovereignty? If God is sovereign, why does he not intervene and prevent these things from happening? The biblical answer to this is that God has intervened, adequately and effectively, by the sending of his Son into the world to save sinners. Fullness of peace and reconciliation is to be found in Christ by all who will turn to him. The Bible sees the prevalence of hatred and conflict in the world in terms not of God’s impotence but of the folly of man’s rejection of God’s grace in Christ Jesus.
And the biblical answer, further, is that God will intervene yet again, at the end of this age, but this time in final judgment, not mercy, when Christ returns in majesty to overthrow every enemy and to bring in the new heavens and the new earth in which righteousness and peace are established forever. Evil is not invincible. The God of the Bible is not powerless.
A vivid picture of our world condition is in fact given in the Bible, in the words of Christ, who foretold that “nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be great earthquakes and famines and pestilences and terrors … and upon earth distress of nations, men’s hearts failing them for fear and for expectation of the things that are coming on the world.” Once again, we see that the Bible is not taken by surprise. The present racial and international hatreds, the savage new nationalisms, the pitiable plight of whole communities, and over all the grim and fearful threat of annihilating nuclear warfare, the evidence is daily before us and affords further proof that the Bible is startlingly relevant to our contemporary situation. And Christ added that when these things begin to come to pass, then his followers are to look up, because their redemption is at hand. Every man will then face Christ, either as Savior or as Judge.
ANOTHER ERA UNDERWAY IN THE AMERICAN VENTURE
The American dream and destiny this week seem hazier than for decades. Whether Senator John F. Kennedy’s election to the United States presidency will signal a further decline, or an upgrading, of democratic processes is the moot question now pondered at home and abroad. During these next years the prime issue may be not mere co-existence, but survival. In assuming the weighty burdens of leadership, the President-elect needs the good will of all citizens, a place in the prayers of God’s people, and firm support for every policy that promotes the best interest of the land.
Concerned with principle rather than party and personality, CHRISTIANITY TODAY focused interest on such pre-campaign issues as gigantic-versus-limited government, the moral issue of inflation and spending, the extension of Federal determination into state affairs, as well as Church-State relationships. In these realms the distinction between major parties has steadily diminished. Both Senator Kennedy and Vice-President Nixon made some hard-to-keep promises (complained one member of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s Board: “Both candidates are promising almost everything but freedom!”). Mr. Kennedy’s skillful campaign gripped public imagination in the popularity race, alongside Mr. Nixon’s failure to sustain a prophetic voice. Both candidates often contended simply as pragmatic politicians.
Inevitably a religious magazine fixes an eye on spiritual aspects of the political campaign, which this year held special interest through Senator Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism. Senator Kennedy, in fact, did not personally reflect historic Catholic traditions any more consistently than Vice-President Nixon mirrored the Protestant outlook. The real significance of the religious development in American life is found not in a growing emergence of a Catholic bloc or party, nor even in a shift of the American political mood into the post-Protestant era, or into an era of pluralistic religious balances. The deeper fact is the widening public judgment that all religion is irrelevant to political attitudes and acts. The American mentality rapidly is losing any distinction of true versus false religion, and is dismissing this contrast as based on unbrotherliness and intolerance. Religion is demeaned to merely a secondary or supplementary support in American life. Curiously it was American Jesuits, not Protestant leaders, who pressed the Fair Campaign Practices Committee specifically to affirm that religion should inform a man’s conscience in the arena of political decision.
Senator Kennedy’s showing from one point of view marked a Roman Catholic breakthrough, from another a Catholic compromise. On the religious issue he courageously declared himself on the side of American rather than Vatican traditions. There were Kennedy’s statements that Church-State separation is ideal (Roman Catholicism has viewed separation as tolerable until a Catholic majority can implement the state as the temporal arm of the Roman church); his opposition to Federal aid to parochial schools (some Jesuits call such a policy unjust); his opposition to an envoy to the Vatican; his professed obligation to the Constitution rather than to the Pope in political affairs. Those who had “future doubts” (“the first Kennedy might be a very good president,” said a distinguished Protestant theologian in Europe, “but the third or fourth might be Innocent III”) detected a rising Catholic lay disgust over the persecution-mentality of Catholicism in Spain, Colombia, and so on. Whether this election-year idealism will blossom into post-election realism supportive of religious freedom remains to be seen.
Yet the Catholic bloc vote entered as decisively into Kennedy’s election as the labor bloc and the Negro vote. All the more remarkable is Mr. Nixon’s high percentage of the total vote, Mr. Kennedy’s margin of victory apparently averaging down to about two votes a precinct. Such bloc pressures, directive of the American outlook, remain a danger signal. What of future big city candidates where political bosses can “deliver” such a vote?
Evangelical Protestant forces passed one test but failed two. The National Association of Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, and other groups still alert to church history warned consistently against Roman Catholicism’s notorious incursion into political arenas for sectarian benefit. They remembered, moreover, that the Reformation not only promoted biblical faith, but challenged Rome’s theology of the state as well as of sin and salvation. Evangelicals had to contend with a hostile press, unable any longer to reach independent judgments on such issues, and largely following the cue of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and of Catholic propagandists in assailing such discussions as bigotry. The press was lured into a shrewd campaign to label all criticism of Roman Catholicism as bigotry. National attention focused negatively on the Bible belt, while the Roman hierarchy did not discourage bloc voting. Even the Fair Campaign Practices Committee tilted to a bias in a nation-wide telecast; its representative properly deplored bigotry, but quite improperly ignored the Committee’s position that a candidate’s religion is properly discussable where it impinges on politics. Meanwhile, spokesmen eager for an ecumenical tolerance-image helped attach the bigotry-image to N.A.E. Others stressed Protestantism’s need of perpetual Reformation more than the timeless significance of Luther’s break with Rome. Discussion of the political issue on the religious side (sectarian exploitation of state benefits) was repressed by ballooning the religious issue with the ill wind of bigotry. In this propaganda shift, Rome lost its historic persecution-image and assigned evangelical Protestantism a bigotry-image.
Not a few Protestants sided in depth with Kennedy’s program of enlarging Federal welfare benefits but promoted his cause under the public umbrella of tolerance, while others supported Kennedy in view of Catholicism’s official antipathy to communism and sympathy with free enterprise.
Evangelical long range losses were striking in two respects, political responsibility and missionary obligation. Evangelicals still react more to secular initiative than to any evangelical political overview consistent with both separation of Church and State and the believer’s social responsibility. Equally unfortunate for evangelical witness is the shadow over Protestant-Catholic relationships, even if widened first by Rome’s grasp for partisan benefits. Whereas Protestant inclusivists usually hold an open-end view of ecumenical cooperation with Rome, and cultivate the tolerance-image, evangelical purveyors of the Gospel often address Roman Catholics only obliquely. Statistically, evangelical strength almost rivals that of Catholics in the United States. But the Roman church has planted Catholic Information Centers in the main cities of America, while evangelicals shape newspaper ads corrective of Knights of Columbus propaganda. Whether the evangelical movement learns to address Roman Catholics aggressively in the dimension of compassion as well as of criticism remains to be seen.
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For a limited time CHRISTIANITY TODAY is offering an unusual bonus to all its readers. Every new, renewal or gift subscription will not only entitle the reader to 24 issues of the magazine but also to an important book of vital current interest.
A choice of titles is offered: 1. The complete New Testament volume of The Biblical Expositor with its scholarly and illuminating insights into both the written Word and the background against which the individual books were written, or 2. Christian Personal Ethics, a text dealing with both the moral revelation of Christianity and the ethical alternatives of speculative philosophy—an invaluable tool for ministers. CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s Dr. Carl F. H. Henry served as consulting editor for the first volume, and is author of the second. Either book with the subscription represents a $11.95 value for $5.
The decision of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s Board of Directors to offer this book bonus to subscribers is a further step of generosity by dedicated evangelical men who have so signally aided the advance of Christianity in our day. Readers who wish to share their blessings with friends at the Christmas season should find this offer an appropriate opportunity for this purpose as well as for widening the evangelical ministry and witness of the magazine.
LITURGICAL REFORM AND STRONG CHURCHMANSHIP
Liturgical Reform is an expression which means diferent things to different people. To some it means the reintroduction into Christian worship of the ritual and vestments of sacerdotalism. To some it is merely a matter of aesthetics, dictated by a liking for that which is ornate, colorful, and spectacular. In some Roman Catholic circles in Europe it implies a process not of elaboration but rather of simplification whereby, for example, a movable table is substituted for a static altar, the sacrament is administered in the evening when most can attend, and services are conducted in the vernacular, instead of in Latin, with the result that the congregation can understand what is being said and done and can join with some intelligence in the Church’s worship. To others, again, Liturgical Reform is an expression without meaning, for the simple reason that their churches, however admirable in other respects, are in the unfortunate position of having virtually no liturgy to reform. The minister is all (a kind of obverse of the Roman priest), while the people are, except for the singing of a couple of hymns, inactive, though we hope not unintelligent, spectators.
To many Evangelical churches are in this last group. This means that in a most important aspect their worship is impoverished. It is not properly congregational. Nor is it in this respect Reformed, for the Reformers of the sixteenth century were certainly conscious of the necessity for liturgical worship—for worship, that is, in which the people actively participate and which is not monopolized, though it is led, by the minister. For this reason the Church of England has always regarded its Book of Common Prayer (and in particular the services of Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion) as one of the most precious heritages of the Reformation. Strong churchmanship follows from liturgical worship that is controlled by the Scriptures. And that does not mean ritualism! Non-liturgical worship is weak worship. It is passive instead of active. Let us therefore strengthen the things which remain.
THE BLESSINGS OF FAITH INCLUDE ITS POWER IN LIFE
One great thrill of evangelical Christianity is that it works. Centuries come and go; races spring up and disperse; cathedrals are erected and pulled down; governments pass laws and repeal them; liturgies are written and forgotten, but Jesus Christ brings the same results yesterday, today, and forever.
When a nonevangelical minister gets discouraged he is in serious trouble. He must battle his way out of a human situation with human resources. When a truly Christian pastor becomes downhearted, however, he knows at least that there is nothing whatever wrong with his product or his message. He studies Scripture and concludes at last that God is testing him for a purpose. As he looks into his own heart, God shows him the way out.
We who are on the Lord’s side must never forget that however small a minority we sometimes may be in our community, we stand in the true apostolic succession. The scarlet thread comes our way and goes on. Christianity draws its strength and staying-power from the inner citadels of prayer. When workers are needed, it provides them. It looks beyond its borders and reflects the original compassion of Christ. It produces fruit in young lives dedicated to Christ.
When a church membership is made up of truly twice-born Christians, the minister does not have to “enrich the mixture” to get his airship off the ground. His church does not strain and fag to eke out some superimposed quota. She simply radiates the love of the Saviour and lets the Spirit do the work.
Sound easy? It is easy! In fact, wonderful!
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INVISIBLE BUT REAL
A motion picture camera has been developed which operates at a speed of 5 million frames per second, compared to the 64 frames per second for an average slow-motion camera.
With such equipment, an instantaneous event can be stretched into a film lasting several hours.
A super-fast X-ray camera has been developed with the power and speed to visualize a bullet as it passes through the barrel of a revolver.
Even the “tracks” of cosmic rays passing through the atmosphere at speeds close to the velocity of light can now be photographed and thereby held for the human eye to witness.
On every hand secrets of the hitherto unknown material world are being discovered, and we either marvel at these things or shrug our shoulders and accept the wonders of modern science.
There are invisible forces working in the world, however, spiritual forces as real as the material and embodying a significance that is infinite in implications.
The whole subject is probably one of the most comforting and at the same time fear-inspiring to be found in all of the Bible. That we live in a day when superficial realism rules out things which cannot be gauged by scientific measurement in no way invalidates truth on which divine revelation has much to say.
Any who may be interested in this subject have but to take a Bible concordance and look up the references having to do with angels, spirits, and demons to come face to face with a tremendous volume of truth which otherwise is unnoticed or willfully ignored.
Some years ago Dean Inge spoke for millions of people when he said, “It is, I think, indisputable that the center of gravity in religion is shifting from authority to experience.” With that shift has come the loss of many of the spiritual values and implications of God’s revealed truth in men’s hearts; for when man believes only that which he can prove or see with human instruments, he has lost a sense of the supernatural, and God and Satan become mere names, not personalities of transcending importance.
Even within the Church there is a strange unawareness of the invisible forces working in the world. We admit that God is a spirit but few of us go on to recognize that he is infinite, eternal, unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth, and love.
As for Satan, he is, according to the multitudes, only a name used in profane language, a figure of speech referred to in jest. The fact that he is a personality, a malignant being exercising great power, is even questioned or denied outright in some theological circles.
As Professor Emile Cailliet has so aptly said, “The neatest trick Satan has ever performed is to convince so many people that he does not exist.”
Our ignorance of the invisible forces around us no more eliminates them than does our failure to apprehend the marvels of nature, the surface of which is constantly being scratched by ever-probing scientific investigation.
We know there is but one God, the living and true God, and that there are three persons in the Godhead—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But how often do we fail to recognize or ascribe to the Holy Spirit his distinct work and prerogatives?
And when it comes to angels, we are prone to relegate them to pious stories of the past in much the same category as elves, fairies, leprechauns, and folklore personalities.
But angels are God’s ministers, his agents of good. The Psalmist speaks of God “who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire, “while from the Bible as a whole we get a glimpse of this innumerable host who do God’s bidding.
“The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them” is far more than a figure of poetic speech; it is a glorious reality for which we should thank a loving God.
When Paul affirms, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose,” the presence and work of angels in God’s economy could well be a part of this comforting truth.
But just as God has his opponent in Satan, so angels have as their active opposites evil spirits who do the bidding of the devil.
That demons had residence in the personalities of men during our Lord’s earthly ministry is a matter of continued reference in the four Gospels. That such evil spirits inhabit people today is known to many who live in areas where spirit worship is practiced. Whether such a phenomenon actually exists in America is probably debatable, but the minions of Satan are certainly not inactive.
Surrounded by a host of the Syrian army, the servant of Elisha cried out in fear: “Alas, my master! how shall we do?” To which the prophet replied: “Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”
The servant lacked spiritual vision; he was aware only of that which he could see with his eyes. “And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.”
God forbid that we should ever get entangled with the realm of spiritualism; but, on the other hand, we may and ought to take comfort and warning from the truths that are clearly taught in Scripture.
In the Bible we are told that the company of angels is “innumerable”; that they are subject to the commands of God; that they join in the praise of God around his throne; that they are powerful; that they exercise a protecting ministry; that in an inscrutible way they have charge over God’s children; that at God’s behest they have stopped the mouths of lions; that an angel delivered Peter from prison; and that they are “sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation.” All of these truths should be a source of comfort to Christians.
But in a consideration of the invisible forces about us, there is also grave warning: Satan is intensely active! Paul reminds us, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
John tells us, “and the whole world is under the power of the evil one.”
What then is the position of the Christian? God has provided us with armor in order to stand against the wiles and power of Satan. He has also provided the Sword of the Spirit by which the evil one is put to flight.
The invisible forces are very real, but for the Christian they hold not terror but comfort and hope.
L. NELSON BELL