Page 6032 – Christianity Today (2024)

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We live in what the late Joseph R. Sizoo called “one of the ‘in-between periods’ of history.” One world is dying while another is struggling to be born.

It is also an age of sagging and sinking hopes. In the lives of many people, hope never seems to take firm root.

Once when the writer was traveling near the East German border the train suddenly lurched, jolting passengers against one another. That touched off an unexpected conversation with two refugees from the horrors of World War II in the Sudetenland under Russian occupancy. “We had only one hope that held life together,” said the elderly man, as his wife nodded. “That was to make it somehow to the Bavarian frontier where—according to the underground rumors—American soldiers would help us and we would be free.” The story of their escape and near-detection as they maneuvered to the American forward lines and finally made it to a life of new possibilities was full of drama. But many people today never make it to a hope that holds their broken world together. They are forever “waiting for Godot”—but Godot never shows. One world is dying; the other is stillborn.

Our age is one of haunting doubt, not only about the past but also about the eternal. Someone has said that modern Americans live little in the past, seldom in the future, and mostly in the present. Whatever barren hope remains seems tainted with atheism and secular materialism. Skepticism about enduring verities seems everywhere in vogue. Theologians no less than philosophers are stamped with question marks. As Roy Pearson says, “The pertinent question today does not appear to be ‘What is worth dying for?’ but ‘What is worth living for?’ Or, to be more exact, ‘Is anything worth living for?’”

Life in the twentieth century is turning sour for lack of real hope and a sense of permanent worth. Everywhere a search for human identity is under way—among the hippies, on the campuses, in the ghettos and slums, among the up-and-outers.

“Hope is what they want,” said an Air Force chaplain from Bolling Field, referring to servicemen headed for Viet Nam.

“Hope is what they need,” whispered a medical doctor of critically ill patients in his care.

“Hope is what they’ve lost,” said an attendant of his charges at a state mental hospital.

Even the seven-billion-dollar-a-year beauty market thrives on the sale, its leaders say, not of loveliness but of “hope.”

Because our generation is adrift from authentic hope, its headlines scream uncertainty and doubt. No generation ever had so much, yet grumbles so continually and wants ever more and more. God rebuked the Israelites in the wilderness who murmured far less. According to the late Dr. W. E. Sangster, Americans not only have more wealth, better homes, and more automobiles than other people but also write and buy the most books on “how to be happy.” As many as three million Americans now may be using marijuana regularly to “turn themselves on.” And Denmark, with a fully managed economy, has the highest suicide rate in the world.

Men can, of course, continue to view human skill and ingenuity as the hope of the world. With self-sufficiency they can boast that, in effect, Jesus Christ was deluded when on Good Friday he cried, “It is finished!,” and that he only bequeathed the vision of a better world to be achieved not by the conversion of sinners but by the pursuit of political millennialism. To distinguish between a speculative and a biblical conception of hope is the big problem of our day. We are finished if our generation does not seek the will of God anew in modern life and society, and realize the purpose of God in Jesus Christ.

Twentieth-century man put Telstar into space and readied rockets to transport astronauts to the moon. But he also created the gas chambers of Auschwitz, fought gigantic world wars spawned by the most literate nations of Europe and Asia, engaged in the atomic incineration of cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, met racial animosity by assassination and by the burning and looting of major cities. Modern rulers still seek world revolution through political oppression of multitudes and the subjection of whole nations. The United Nations, projected as the world’s best hope for peace, has, for all that, been reduced to impotence in the Holy Land and Viet Nam. And on academic campuses that assert their role as the critical center of modern society, the rampant intellectual doubt and moral vacuum among many students virtually erase the Ten Commandments.

In apostolic times, hope was one of life’s three cardinal virtues. Today, only where Christianity is vital does hope give strength to those who have lost heart. As the Apostle Paul put it, believers shine like stars in a dark world; they proffer the word of life in a warped and crooked generation. Hope equips the Christian to help banish the bleak shadows of human despondency.

Times of human doubt need not end in ultimate despair. In fact, it is gain if men learn that some of their silent absolutes are in truth unjustifiable prejudices. Science may have put the stamp of modernity upon our century, but what science discovers is always subject to revision. Such recent modern beliefs as man’s inherent goodness and the inevitability of progress have already met a judgment day. Next in line may well be the notion that society is simply a reflex of economic forces or of the love of power.

Critical re-examination of the ruling tenents of modern life can and ought to lead us to authentic hope. God is not accorded his rightful place in these views, and hope in our time turns on a recovery of his presence and blessing; without awareness of the reality of God, the world sinks into confusion and chaos. We need desperately to recover the finality of God’s commandments, the sure fact of moral laws and principles by which God brackets our lives. In a world groping for direction, anyone who scraps the supremacy of Jesus Christ is sure to lose the way, the truth, and the life.

The word “hope,” in the Christian religion, gains meaning and power not only in the dimensions of the present but also in relation to God’s future and man’s destiny, and in relation to God’s great redemptive promise and acts of the past. Hope is not a simple desire to look ahead to a happier tomorrow, or an adventurer’s wish to discover the unknown. Small wonder that the restless modern spirit exhibits a new curiosity about supernatural verities. In a major work on The Biblical Doctrine of Heaven (Moody Press, 1968), the prophetic scholar Dr. Wilbur M. Smith reminds us that the Christian revelation of the future differs from the vague speculations of the classical writers of Greece and of the non-Christian mystics in that the Christian hope is firmly related to God’s purposes accomplished in and through Jesus Christ.

Christ’s resurrection augured certainty about the future: he who triumphed over death was the first fruits of a general resurrection and is the ground and source of the Christian’s new spiritual life. All of human life gains new promise and prospect in the light of the Redeemer’s conquest of sin and death. For Christ assumed human nature in the incarnation, and in the resurrection carried human nature into the eternities. Since, in the resurrection, human nature as Jesus Christ published it is raised to the eternal order, we have not only God’s word but also his deed to remind us that sin and injustice and death have no future; Jesus Christ alone is the way into the world to come.

In the United States today the Christian religion increasingly faces an identity-crisis. Fewer and fewer people know what authentic Christianity means, and even many church-goers are asking: “Will the real Christian please stand up?” Seldom has evangelical Christianity faced larger opportunities in America, and seldom has its leadership been more needed.

If evangelical Christianity does not pervade and revitalize American religiosity, the question will loom whether it has forfeited its historic vision and vitality. Surely its claim to cultural significance is not ideally based only on a capacity for erecting new churches, holding fast to the religion of the Bible, stimulating sacrificial support of evangelistic causes, and shunning the besetting personal vices that shape the current social outlook. But what is its larger mission? Amid the struggle for men’s minds and wills, does it hold out to the confused American masses a clear view of the nature of reality, the goal of history, and the meaning of existence? Does it mirror to the unreached masses in a winsome way the new life and purpose and hope to be found in Christ?

If evangelical Christians are not striving to achieve these purposes, if they are not making people aware of their high concerns for others in this time of national trouble, do they really deserve survival as a community of faith? When pacifists ask, “What is worth dying for?,” and activists ask, “What is worth living for?,” is not Christ’s Church called to discuss the issues of life and death with precision, power, and publicness? Are evangelical Protestants really involved at the frontiers of modern doubt and despair?

Strangely, although evangelical Christians are numerically the largest spiritual community in America, they get less mass-media exposure of their views and ways than a hundred minority causes. Consider the figures. In the United States, the religious population is 52.5 per cent Protestant, 37.1 per cent Roman Catholic, and 4.6 per cent Jewish; yet the national religious coverage is largely projected in terms of Protestant-Catholic-Jewish audiences. The National Council of Churches preempts most Protestant time but gives only token exposure to evangelical vitalities—even though at least one-third of its constituency is evangelical, and even though considerably more than half the Protestants in America are evangelical. There is every reason to think that evangelicals outnumber non-evangelicals within the Protestant population in the United States by at least 5 to 4; there may be, in fact, almost as many evangelical Protestants as there are Roman Catholics. Yet in mass-media visibility, evangelical Christians somehow seem to come off worse than the Black Muslims. Except for the attention given the crusades of Billy Graham, the gains made by CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Carl McIntire’s bold propensity for counter-picketing, and occasional special events, evangelicals are largely ignored unless they purchase time.

The reason for this evangelical predicament is obvious. Evangelicals are woefully fragmented. Non-evangelicals like it that way and exploit this weakness to the hilt. A divided task force is a decimated force. Evangelical Protestants are the most disadvantaged religious minority in America, and they have themselves to blame most of all.

Evangelicals cannot forever thrive on their differences with one another. If they are to become a formative force, they must show their spiritual unity to the world. In the day of divine judgment, some influential leaders may find themselves in an ecclesiastical lineup trying to account for an opportunity they squandered at the high tide of the culture-crisis in America. Do these leaders not see the scandal of a situation in which evangelicals—who hold in common more of the truth of revelation than the pluralistic neo-Protestant bodies—insist that true unity is theological, predicated on that truth of revelation which they espouse, but are themselves splintered, sub-splintered, and supersplintered? Have not many issues that originally divided the American Council of Christian Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals long since been obscured by much more important concerns, and has not the time come for these groups to hold earnest conversations in hopes of lowering their fences? Do not evangelicals in isolated bodies like the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Churches of Christ, and a great many others—represented neither in the National Council of Churches nor in other transdenominational structures—see that the lack of intra-evangelical cooperation for common ends simply weakens the influence of evangelical vitalities and yields an unnecessary advantage to non-evangelical minorities? Can they not see that the issues of concern to the Protestant Reformation—before the unending proliferation of denominations began—are issues that distinguish evangelicals from neo-Protestants more decisively than the issues that now separate evangelicals? Cannot even Southern Baptists—11 million persons maintaining denominational separateness—see how pluralistic churchmen in the conciliar movements deluge evangelical vitalities? Can they not see that if evangelicals were to make common cause, they could shape a new spiritual situation?

And is it not wholly clear that the conciliar movement continues to divide and subdue its evangelical contingents? Evangelical colleges and seminaries it merges or transforms into religiously innocuous institutions; new evangelical centers are resisted; denominational publishing houses promote liberal and radical literature but virtually boycott evangelical publications; theological consultations preserve a plurality of views that gives more publicity to doctrinal deviation than to orthodoxy. In these circ*mstances, the 14 million or more conservative evangelicals trapped within conciliar ecumenism find themselves woefully outmaneuvered, although they represent the historic Christian beliefs. When threatened by dissent, the establishment can always name a compromise committee that will slow the pace of evangelical dilution while further dividing the conservative element.

The hierarchy aside (and it is no small task to put aside a self-perpetuating hierarchy that pontificates its private views as those of the entire conciliar movement), there is within the ecumenical movement not only an evangelical vanguard but also a growing phalanx of disillusioned liberals who are casting a longing eye at neglected evangelical traditions. They are embarrassed by the flux of modern theology and its obvious loss of the note of authority; they are distressed over the deterioration of an aberrant social gospel to an abortive social revolutionism; they increasingly sense that man himself needs to be remade by supernatural grace; and they reach out hands to those who proclaim a divine Gospel and seek anchorage in the scriptural word. But they find themselves showered by evangelical cross fire and sometimes think it may be safer to retreat than to advance.

Since the ACCC has nothing to do with NAE and even less to do with anybody in the NCC, and since the NAE mainly serves evangelicals outside the NCC, the large host of evangelicals surviving in mainstream churches inside the NCC have nowhere to turn but to a Graham crusade for a show of common evangelical witness. Existing as they do in the very midst of theological confusion, these evangelicals are best positioned to confront and challenge the present ecumenical compromise. For their churches largely remain formally committed to historical evangelical standards, and their denominational institutions were founded and endowed by evangelical interests, though later misappropriated by liberal leaders. The establishment betrays that historic commitment whenever it penalizes the evangelical witness.

If evangelicals understand this strategic situation, they will resist the growing temptation to confine leadership of their enterprises to those who are outside the conciliar movement and limited in their associations mainly to independent fundamentalist churchmen. Without a welding of evangelical forces inside and outside the conciliar movement, theological conservatives are not likely to gain significant exposure through the mass media and in the public scene. The need for broad evangelical cooperation in America ought to be a standing concern.

The NCC’s concentration on the “far out” in its television programming is producing liabilities, for now only what is novel seems newsworthy. Even Roman Catholicism seems to make news more for defections and distortions than for examples of faith. Yet the cooperating NCC denominations still are able to reflect what they are doing and what effect they are having more effectively than the disunited evangelicals.

But a second factor contributes almost as largely to evangelical weakness, and not even full-scale evangelical cooperation by itself can remedy it. That factor is evangelicals’ readiness to concentrate their energies on attacking unacceptable views, rather than on articulating their alternative. It is easier to get funds, and to preserve support, by exploiting and gratifying the anxieties of well-to-do critics of the establishment than by expounding a convincing and comprehensive position worthy of evangelical loyalties. Yet without the latter, evangelicals cannot hope to carry the day. A mere holding operation has no more future than has Chiang Kai-shek’s army in Formosa.

That is why it simply will not do to make it the Church’s main business to oppose Communism, or neo-Protestant theology, or the Church’s political entanglement, or anything else. Can one escape a lump in his throat when a well-intentioned evangelical posts a Christmas card bearing as its central message the conviction that the Church ought not to become politically involved? Surely we can win that battle—important as it is—and lose the main war. Of course, if we lose that battle, we may forfeit professional soldiers who know right from wrong in the public conduct of the institutional church. But evangelicals nonetheless must give priority to the precise proclamation of the truth of revelation, to a compelling exposition of revealed religion. In evangelical circles today there is an immense deficit in systematic theological studies and sustained biblical reflection. Many evangelicals find religious dialogue confusing because they do not understand the subtleties of theological semantics. Some have so long concentrated only on what they reject that Roman Catholicism suddenly seems evangelical to them because it accepts so much that liberalism discards. The Protestant Reformers saw these issues in a clearer light.

A third requirement for evangelical renewal must certainly be more serious involvement in the academic arena. Today, only 15 per cent of the college and university students attend church-related institutions (such as these are). The great majority are enrolled on campuses where, in the main, the whole span of supernatural beliefs is either ignored or demeaned. The loss of youth to the evangelical cause ought to be a central concern of evangelical leadership. For more than a decade evangelist Billy Graham has been aware that many of the thousands of college-age converts made during his crusades are later adversely influenced by naturalistic university education. It may be too late to bring into being an influential Christian university whose graduates would permeate the secular arena with a compelling vocational witness to the enduring truths. Evangelicals stand today in dire need of a brain trust, a visibility trust, a money trust, to confront the present age with the biblical claim aggressively and effectively. The recently founded Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, were it to acquire a serviceable suburban estate near an influential university complex, could be a significant beginning.

A fourth factor in evangelical renewal in the next generation must assuredly be inter-racial liaison among Christian believers, particularly in the big cities. Great metropolitan areas are increasingly under the dominance of Negro majorities, and here are located the powerful radio and television stations and newspapers so critically important for the dissemination of ideas and the confrontation of culture in a mass-media age. Recent attempts to force a new era in inter-racial relations merely by legislation and coercive factors have had limited success and many liabilities. And no matter how successful they are, they cannot go beyond the stage, necessary in itself, of assuring equal rights before the law. The next step must turn upon interpersonal relations. Where can these be advanced better than in the climate of a mutual faith in God and concern for fulfilling the Great Commission?

Ours is a decade when some Protestant churchmen think they are not really relevant unless they have been photographed with the Pope or on a picket line, or can call a prominent priest by his first name, or are on speaking terms with a neighborhood prostitute. Certainly there is nothing wrong with witnessing to one and all about the joys of new life in Christ. But the evangelical clergy glory above all in the fact that they are devout expositors of the Book. Amid the “dreary resources of twentieth-century nihilism,” those who have discarded Christian theology and morals “like so much antiquated rubbish”—to borrow Russell Kirk’s characterization in The Intemperate Professor—will not long convince the masses that they are curators of the churches. Many neo-Protestant theologians have laryngitis when it comes to articulating the truth of revelation, and some even hope to advance Christianity by affirming the death of God. There is no spiritual challenge in the “nod to God” programs; they produce dialogue when Christ calls for disciples.

The loyal evangelical followers of Christ and of the apostles see no reason for muffling the divine message of mercy; they are wholly unready to let the modern world rewrite the agenda of Christian concerns and action. They have no anxiety over the survival of the regenerate Church, and know that only doom awaits the alternatives. The despised ism of evangelism still holds out modern man’s best and only hope. That God has provided salvation from the guilt and the power of sin—this is the most exciting and relevant news for a sick society.

Evangelical Christianity has much to commend it. But unless it is making unwitting plans to go underground, it had best take a look at the plight of the evangelicals in the larger context of American religious life. The clouds are closing in, and soon there may not be enough visibility to get successfully airborne.

THE LORD’S DAY IN MODERN LIFE

The Lord’s Day Alliance of the United States will sponsor a major Consultation on the Lord’s Day in Contemporary Culture at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, October 7–9. Leaders from all fields of endeavor and representatives from various denominations will participate in the three-day gathering. The project is a timely one, for the historic New Testament significance of the Lord’s Day is less and less apparent in modern society. Foundation papers will discuss “Sunday in a Pluralistic Society,” “The Secular Culture and the Lord’s Day,” “The Contemporary Church and the Lord’s Day,” and “Commerce, Industry and the Lord’s Day.”

The Lord’s Day Alliance has called upon the members of the United States Senate to defeat the Monday Holiday bill that was passed by the House of Representatives. Dr. Samuel A. Jeanes of Merchantville, New Jersey, the alliance’s state and national affairs committee chairman, asserts: “The Churches have a mere fifty-two days in which to do the major part of their important work. We would urge you not to support this legislation that will work a hardship on the programs of the churches and temples of our land. The tensions of our times with a growing crime rate … strife and resentment in our cities … the bloodshed on our streets … the disregard for law and order … all indicate that we do not need less teaching of spiritual values, but more. If this legislation is adopted it will be another roadblock over and around which religious educators will have to go in the task of teaching spiritual values to a materialistically oriented society.”

This seems to us to add up to a bit of outfield logic. While it is true that three-day weekends will place added strain on the churches, particularly those that bulk their educational effort on Sunday, something more will be needed to advance spiritual values than opposition to the Monday Holiday bill. Hopefully the Valley Forge consultation will wrestle with such issues in depth and point the way to a creative Christian approach to the problems.

SPOCK, COFFIN, AND VIET NAM

The conviction of Dr. Benjamin Spock, Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and two co-defendants on the charge of conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft should provide some satisfaction to American enlisted or drafted fighting men who are putting their lives on the line for the cause of freedom in Viet Nam.

Spock and Coffin contended that moral concerns over the Viet Nam war and the constitutionality of military conscription motivated them in their overt opposition to the draft. And many people respected their courage in acting in accord with their convictions. But they forfeited their right to this respect when after their arrest they did not willingly accept the penalty of civil disobedience but sought to show in their trial that what they said and did was permitted under the First Amendment.

These protestors should be admired neither for moral courage nor for wisdom. In their moral judgment of American policy in Viet Nam, says United States attorney and Korean veteran John Wall, they have been “too self-righteous.” Like so many of the new clergy, they created the appearance, claims writer John W. Bishop, Jr., of saying, in effect, “what God would say if He understood the situation as well as they do.” It is quite evident that all responsible citizens—not only Spock-like moralists—and particularly federal decision-makers are deeply concerned about the moral ramifactions of U. S. policy and the suffering and death resulting from the war. They are fully cognizant of the arguments registered by anti-Viet Nam critics. But the American government maintains commitments in Viet Nam in order to stand for freedom—for others and for ourselves—and against the tyranny that Communists and other aggressors would inflict upon men unable to repulse them. Apart from the preservation of freedom, America has stood to gain nothing from a war that has so far cost 15,000 lives and $130 billion from an overtaxed economy.

The nation desperately hopes the current peace talks in Paris will end the conflict and establish an honorable peace. American negotiators, remembering the tragic American compromise that made possible the Communist takeover of China, must sternly oppose creation of a coalition government and reject any policy that would eventually lead to loss of freedom for the South Vietnamese. Any such concessions would mean that thousands had lost their lives in vain.

If peace talks break down, America must initiate a win policy to end the war swiftly. Prolonged conflict will mean greater suffering and death in Southeast Asia, deeper demoralization at home, and continued diversion of funds from constructive and humane projects.

Although Spock and Coffin undergird their Viet Nam viewpoint by an appeal to “morality,” their policies are in the last analysis hardly moral. America must not follow counsel that implies a disastrously weak stand against Communist tyranny and betrayal of an ally to a power-hungry world-wide conspiracy. Americans should turn a deaf ear to those who would dissuade us from doing our duty as a nation.

THE CHURCH’S FAIR SHARE

Religion is big business in America, but its tax-exempt ride to riches must soon come to an end. The recent “CBS Reports” hour on “The Business of Religion” spotlighted the need for the nation’s churches to make full public disclosures of their financial status and assume a share of the national tax burden. Church wealth is immense. It is estimated at $40–100 billion in property holdings and $8 billion in gifts per year, all tax exempt. In addition, churches are not required to pay taxes on income from properties, investments, and businesses unrelated to religious purposes.

It is high time for all churches to report their incomes and pay taxes on business profits. Church land and buildings used specifically for religious and educational purposes should remain tax free, along with those of other eleemosynary institutions. But the Church must not shirk its responsibility to pay taxes on business ventures on the same basis as private enterprisers.

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Dear Connoisseurs of Linguistic Jive:

National Council of Churches social activists have, as part of their crash program on the “Crisis in the Nation,” erected a shanty in Resurrection City. It stands on Martin Luther King Plaza right off Abernathy Boulevard. New Breed churchmen have earnestly tried to establish “meaningful relationships” with the soul-brother—yippie—type demonstrators. I’m not sure how their “relevant dialogue” has gone, but I imagine their language adaptation may have been something like this:

“Hey, man, those long beads over the Nehru jacket and denims are wild. Like they’re the most! In this uptight world what a gas it is to be here in Resurrection City doin’ our own thing. Black and white together—sockin’ it to those Machiavellian racists on Capitol Hill—man, it’s positively groovy. Before we’re through, the Establishment’s really gonna know where it’s at. It’s high time the plastic man laid some bread on us poor cats. Till we get what’s ours nobody’s gonna turn us ’round.

“But you know, man, we gotta split from our own hang-ups, too. Like we gotta overcome our angst. You don’t dig? Sorry about that, Clyde. I mean we gotta get outa drag and get ultimately concerned. Ultimately concerned about what? Ultimately concerned about ultimate concern. I’m not talkin’ about Big Daddy in Skysville. I’m talkin’ about bein’ a man for others. I’m tellin’ it like it is. We also gotta accept the fact that we’re accepted, know what I mean? Man, that’s greater than droppin’ acid or flyin’ with a joint of grass. It’s really somethin’ else! It’s like an everlastin’ love-in!

“Of course, the straights don’t dig this. It’s not their bag. They’re too hooked on pie in the sky. And they’re always tryin’ to scare people with that jazz about the end of the world—Heah come de judge! Heah come de judge! They don’t realize that the existential moment is the thing. It’s now that’s important. We can’t wait. We gotta play our game now—and the name of the game is power—now! We gotta stick together and keep shakin’ up the honkies till we get some of that power. In the process of doin’ our own thing, we soul brothers will really tune in to each other. We’ll experience life force. And that’ll really blow our minds. As I said, Baby Cakes, I’m tellin’ it like it is. But we better get in that chow line now. It’s free, y’know.”

EUTYCHUS III

With heart and soul,

FACING THE CHANGE

Thank you for the excellent article by Harold Fife, “The Changing Face of Missions” (June 7). The observations, especially that of the existence of the Church in most of the areas of the world, are accurate and desperately in need of emphasis in our churches today. In fact, I consider it my greatest obligation as a returned missionary to try to educate people at home to missions today.

RICHARD B. STEWART, M.D.

Augusta, Ga.

Harold W. Fife presents some very sound suggestions which are worthy of consideration by any mission board.

RALPH HOBSON

United Baptist Church

Presque Isle, Me.

“The Missionary and Cultural Shock” (June 7) was very revealing.…

There seems to exist a syndrome among missionaries on furlough to present a glorious picture of the work, no doubt in hopes of acquiring support. Because of this, conclusion number two—“Homeland supporters should be sympathetic about the new missionary’s problems in cultural adjustment and should pray specifically about this area”—is in many cases asking for prayer on a subject of which very few people are aware. The dynamic presentation of the work on the field causes many Christians to assume that the missionaries are stronger and more spiritual than everyone else.

GEORGE WAKEFIELD

Hazelwood, Mo.

HELPFUL SCOOP

An undesigned scoop! How fitting, the articles on the Israeli-Arab conflict (June 7) in the light of that week’s tragedy, and the hatred expressed.

Beside, they were helpful articles and interesting.

KEITH MARTIN

Central Baptist Church

Wallaceburg, Ont.

“Perspective on Arab-Israeli Tensions” gave the following two viewpoints:

Dr. Culbertson … was favorable to the overall Israeli position. His analysis contained at least forty-two separate Scripture references.

Dr. Kelso … in his vehement defense of the Arab position did not use a single verse from the Bible.

HARRY JACOBSON

Director

AEDUS Community Center

Chicago, Ill.

James L. Kelso’s article … failed to give the main reason for American support of Israel since 1948: the Jewish vote.…

If the Christian Church is guilty for the present Arab hostility toward the United States, it is because of the Church’s failure to counter the Zionists’ nationalistic arguments. The Zionists were able to convince the United States that they represented the Jewish vote and that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine was in America’s best interest. Without sufficient opposition from either the Christian Church or the Arab block, the Zionist cause in Palestine carried the day, and Palestine became a Jewish state.

ROBERT G. PAUL

Pasadena, Calif.

COMBATTING ANTI-SEMITISM

The editorial, “The New Testament and the Jew” (June 7), is excellent. Actually, to say that the New Testament is anti-Semitic is itself as anti-Semitic a statement as anyone can make.… For by such viciously false utterances, men, both Jewish and Gentile, are blinded to the glorious saving light of the most wonderful book in the universe, the New Testament. And thus they are kept estranged from God; for in it only does he reveal the way of reconciliation between man and himself.

I only wish those Jews and professing Christians who so perversely call the New Testament anti-Semitic could hear, as I have, what happens to an anti-Semite when he comes to know the New Testament as it really is. Here is what I, a Hebrew-Christian, have heard such men say: “I used to hate the Jews; but now I love them.” Quite a remarkable effect to come from an “anti-Semitic” book, What?

MEYER MARCUS

Scarborough, Ont.

Lately, a new attitude has appeared among liberal or non-religious Jews, an attitude supported, unfortunately, by some liberal Protestant theologians and ministers. Seeking to find natural causes for the Jews’ suffering, they have begun to point to the New Testament as the basis for anti-Semitism.…

These liberals propose that we evangelicals confess our guilt … [and] openly confess that the New Testament is a legacy of myths, written by bigots, filled with lies against a people who would not believe in Christ.

Would this really help combat anti-Semitism? I say that it would not! In fact, it would only increase the world’s persecution of the Jewish people!…

Sober thinking reveals that it is the Christian nations that have opened their hearts and doors to the Jews.… (I say “Christian” in opposition to Islamic or any other religious faith not founded on the New Testament revelation of Christ.) Do these liberals who attack us know that it was the good will and interest of Christian governments that gave Israel her land? It certainly was not the Arabs who did it! No, it is not by destroying the New Testament and the evangelical faith that we are going to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, because the Gospel alone breaks down the middle wall of partition (Eph. 2:12–18) and makes Jews and Gentile one in Christ Jesus.

JACOB GARTENHAUS

Founder and President

International Board of Jewish Missions

Atlanta, Ga.

Anti-Semitism is an acquired reaction just like racism—it is a manifestation of racism. Some thirty years ago, when I was a missionary in China, I read several statements by theologians (?) asserting that anti-Semitism was due largely to the anti-Jewish implications of the Gospel of John. I determined to try to substantiate this hypothesis. I spoke to a good friend of mine, a very devout Chinese Christian and a serious student of the Bible, and asked him, “Have you read the Gospel of John?” “Of course,” he answered. “Many, many times. Why do you ask?” I replied by asking, “Do you hate the Jews?” To which he responded with evident astonishment: “Why, of course not. I don’t know anything about the Jews.” I am led to the conclusion that anti-Semitism has its root in two factors—cultural inoculation, and Jewish intransigence. Perhaps Christians would do well to emulate at least a modicum of their intransigence (Rom. 12:2).

H. M. VEENSCHOTEN

Byron Center, Mich.

TOUR TO NIRVANA?

I do enjoy Eutychus III. Do you suppose he would be interested in leading a summer tour to Nirvana (“Dear Probers of Inner Space,” June 7)? I’ve heard so much about it, I’d at least appreciate directions as to where (or how) it is to be found. I am most interested in meditation—however, not in the company of gurus.… Seriously, I do enjoy your articles.… Thank you for challenging, informing, and amusing.

BETTY HANGARTNER

Demythologizing the Bible

For many years Barth was the leading theologian. The whole period between the two world wars was dominated by his theology. After the Second World War, however, the situation changed. In 1952 Paul Tillich, summed up his impression of the theological scene in these words: “When you come to Europe of this day, it is not as it was before, with Karl Barth in the center of discussion; it is now Rudolf Bultmann who is in the center.”

Actually the change had started during the Second World War. In 1941 Bultmann delivered a lecture on “New Testament and Mythology,” in which he outlined his so-called demythologizing program. According to him, the Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, is full of mythical conceptions and representations that are unacceptable for modern man. We must therefore demythologize the Bible, i.e., strip the essential message, the kerygma, from its mythical framework.

Bultmann’s program has had a tremendous influence upon post-war theology. Nearly all leading theologians in Germany today are former students of his or at least have been strongly influenced by his way of thinking. In the United States, similar but even much more radical ideas have been advocated by Paul Tillich, and again we must say that many of the leading theologians belong to this school. Some go even so far as to say that the traditional idea of God, based on the Bible, is dead.

What does this new approach mean for our understanding of the Bible? In brief, it means that what is supernatural in the Bible can no longer be accepted. There is, for instance, no place for miracles. All the miracles recorded in the Old and the New Testament (with the possible exception of those that can be “explained” psychologically—which means, of course, that they are no real miracles either!) must be rejected as myths. This holds true of the miracles that are attributed to Jesus. And, we must go a step further and say that the miracle that, according to the New Testament, Jesus himself is in his own person, is also a mythological representation. There never was a real incarnation: God becoming man. Jesus was nothing else than a man in whom God was present in a special way, or perhaps better, who stood in a special relationship to God. The virgin birth is legend that in pictorial language points to this relationship. We cannot speak, either, of a real atonement, in the sense of an offering by Jesus of his life as a sacrifice to God. Bultmann describes the New Testament view of the cross in this way: “The Jesus who was crucified was the preexistent, incarnate Son of God, and as such he was without sin. He is the victim whose blood atones for our sins. He bears vicariously the sin of the world, and by enduring the punishment for sin on our behalf he delivers us from death” (“New Testament and Mythology,” in H. W. Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, 1960, I, 35). His comment is: “This mythological interpretation is a hotchpotch of sacrificial and juridical analogies, which have ceased to be tenable for us today.” As to the resurrection, we cannot possibly take this literally and say that Jesus arose in the body in which he was crucified. Furthermore, there never was a real ascension, nor will there be a real second coming. All these matters are pure myths.

But why? Does not the Bible describe them as facts? Modern theologians do not deny this. But they say that the Bible writers could tell stories about such “facts” because they shared the primitive world picture of those days. To put it again in Bultmann’s words:

The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings—the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events.… It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do [ibid., p. 1].

For people who hold such a world picture, it is not difficult to believe in miracles. In fact, it is the most “natural” thing to do so. But for modern man it is impossible to accept this. In a much quoted sentence Bultmann said: “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of daemons and spirits” (ibid., p. 5).

But what then? Must we cut all these “myths” out of our Bible and simply throw them away? No, Bultmann says. As a matter of fact, this was the great mistake of the older liberals. They eliminated all the myths, with the consequence that all that was left of the Bible was a small booklet with a few basic principles of religion and ethics. Bultmann wants to go a different way. He believes that we should not eliminate the myths but rather reinterpret them. We should try to find out what kind of human self-understanding lies behind them and what kind of personal experience is expressed by them. In this way these myths will furnish us with an important message for our self-understanding and our experience today.

The World View of Modern Science

We cannot here go into the details of the theology of Bultmann and his followers. But we must note that these scholars approach the Bible with certain presuppositions that come, not from the Bible itself, but from somewhere else. And it is obvious that they measure the Bible by these presuppositions and force it to conform to them.

The first presupposition is the world view of modern science. According to many modern theologians of the Bultmann school, this world is a closed entity in which everything is determined by the laws of nature, in particular by the law of cause and effect, so that there is no place for divine “intervention.” Bultmann himself seems to accept this view as absolute truth. Admittedly, he has also said that “the science of today is no longer the same as it was in the nineteenth century, and to be sure, all the results of science are relative, and no world view of yesterday or today or tomorrow is definitive” (Jesus Christ and Mythology, p. 37). But from all his books it is quite clear that he believes that the laws of nature give us the final word about this universe. On the same page from which the above quoted words were taken we read:

Modern man acknowledges as reality only such phenomena or events as are comprehensible within the framework of the rational order of the universe. He does not acknowledge miracles because they do not fit into this lawful order. When a strange or marvelous accident occurs, he does not rest until he has found a rational cause.

The question must be asked: Is Bultmann’s world view really scientific? I am not so sure that it is. For one thing, it seems to be the world view of nineteenth-rather than twentieth-century science. Since the formulation of the quantum theory based on Planck’s radiation law and the subsequent work in the same field by Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, and others, many modern scientists no longer believe that this world is such a “closed” one, regulated by the unbreakable, deterministic laws of nature. But even apart from the present trends in physics, we should never forget that the theory of a “closed” world is not of a scientific but rather of a philosophical nature. In simple words, it is not a matter of science but of belief. It may be helpful to go somewhat deeper into this, because there is so much confusion on this point, both inside and outside the Church.

First of all, we want to state that no one, of course, wishes to deny the relative value of the modern scientific world view. Both the non-Christian and the Christian accept the law of cause and effect as the indispensable starting point for all scientific work. But at the same time we must emphasize the adjective “relative.” The scientific world view deals with only one aspect of reality. It looks at this world from one limited angle and thus sees it as a mechanism ruled by the laws of nature. Or to put it in another way, it studies the “natural” connections between the various parts of this cosmos. But science as science can never go beyond this mechanistic aspect. It cannot make any statement about the relation of this very same cosmos to God, for this relation cannot be observed or measured. This is the realm of faith.

Faith looks at the same reality that is the object of study for science, but it looks at it from God’s viewpoint and says: God is at work here. When science says, “This is a matter of the laws of nature,” faith says, “It is a matter of God’s power upholding everything.” These two statements are not contradictory but rather complementary. Together they form a twofold approach to the same reality. For faith this whole world is the “workshop of God.” It is he who maintains it. It is his power that keeps the various constituent elements of the cosmos in their right relationship and that upholds the forces science describes as “laws of nature.” The cosmos is never, not even for a single moment, without God’s presence. If it were, it would immediately cease to be a cosmos and would become a chaos. Even worse, it would fall back into nothingness, from which it was called forth by God in his act of creation.

This world is always God’s world. It is always filled with his presence. And there is no reason why he should not do special works, that is, miracles—in his own world. Nor is there any reason why he should not be able to come into this world in a special way, namely, in the incarnation of his Son, Jesus Christ. In this miracle, God, the same God, is at work in his own “workshop” in a unique way. When therefore Bultmann and many others with him say that miracles are impossible, they simply rule God out of his own world. And we should realize that this is a matter, not of the scientific versus the primitive world view, but of the unbelief versus faith. On this point Bultmann believes in the philosophy of science rather than in the revelation of the Bible.

Modern Existentialism

There is still another major presupposition in Bultmann’s view of the Bible: his acceptance of modern philosophy in the form of existentialism. Again we cannot go into details. It must suffice to say that modern existentialism looks upon man in the same way as many modern scientists look upon the world as a whole. Man too is “a self-subsistent unity immune from interference of supernatural powers.” There is virtually no place for such a thing as the penetration of the Holy Spirit into the close texture of man’s own natural powers. In other words, there is no place for such a thing as regeneration.

Philip E. Hughes trenchantly expresses his criticism of the new theology in these words: “The Holy Spirit has been ushered off the stage, and the human spirit dominates the scene” (Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology, ed. P. E. Hughes, 1966, p. 22).

The Form-critical Method

All this also applies to the so-called form-critical method used by Bultmann and other modern theologians in their study of the Bible. There are several critical methods of studying the Bible, used by conservative theologians as well as others. First is textual criticism. It is a well-known fact that none of the original manuscripts of our Bible books has been preserved. All we have are a great number of copies, dating from various periods and greatly differing in purity of text. No single copy is altogether pure. In the course of transmission, all manuscripts have been corrupted to some degree. It is the task of textual criticism to establish, as accurately as possible, the original text, and conservative Bible scholars engage in this task just as much as their liberal colleagues.

Secondly, there is the method of literary criticism. The books of the Bible, though from one point of view unique because they are inspired and therefore the Word of God, are at the same time ordinary books like all other books, and they share the characteristics of all books written by human authors. This means, among other things, that in them we find different kinds of literature, and these various kinds must be studied carefully if we are to understand them. The ecclesiastical tradition about the authors and the addressees, if not revealed in the book itself, must be submitted to thorough examination. In the case of the New Testament Gospels, there is obviously some kind of relationship among the first three Gospels, the so-called Synoptic Gospels (“synoptic” means giving an account of the same events from a common point of view). It is the task of literary criticism to study this relationship and, if possible, to discover which Gospel was written first and then used by the others. It is also clear to the attentive student of the Bible that several of the books have undergone editing. Because of this, we find so-called interpolations here and there (e.g., in Deut. 2:10–12, 20–23; 3:9, 11, 14). All these matters are studied by conservative scholars as well as non-conservative ones, and rightly so. There is, however, an important difference in approach. The conservatives accept the Bible as the Word of God and therefore refrain from criticizing matters that are clearly mentioned in the books themselves, but the critics include everything in their research and, at least in principle, are prepared to put every statement under the microscope of their criticism.

Finally, there is the third method of criticism, form criticism. By this is meant the critical research that wants to go behind the present form of the Bible books to discover what was the “pre-history” of the present records. For example, form criticism asks: What was the situation in the period before our present Gospels were written? Which were the sources used by the Evangelists? What was the typical form of the oral tradition that preceded the fixation of the kerygma in the Gospels?

- More fromKlaas Runia

Harold O. J. Brown

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Do we have the right to generalize about “modern theology” or to speak of the “modern theologian” as though he belonged to a well-defined class? Can we say that the various competing contemporary schools of theology and all their different advocates have anything in common beyond similar titles and the fact that they exist today? “Classical” or orthodox Protestantism and its modern adherents are easy to identify by their fidelity to the great Reformation confessions of faith. “Liberal” Protestanism, which has supposedly been theologically obsolete since World War I at the latest, is still with us today, more deeply entrenched than is often recognized. Neither of these two schools is what is meant by the expression “modern theology.”

The Unity of Modern Theology

There are at least two other major trends in recent theology: the “theology of the Word of God” and the theology of “existentialist interpretation.” Each has some legitimate claim to the label “modern,” but the two combat each other vigorously. With the “theology of the Word of God” we associate certain parallel or similar trends: dialectical theology, neo-orthodoxy, crisis-theology, and more recently “heilsgeschichtliche Theologie,” and such names as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Heim, Oscar Cullmann, and most recently Wolfhart Pannenberg. The term “existentialist interpretation” covers the school—now in its third generation—that was molded by its encounter with Martin Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of human self-understanding. It includes the famous name of Rudolf Bultmann as well as those of such disciples and friends of his as Ernst Fuchs, Ernst Käsemann, and Gerhard Ebeling; in a slightly different sense we could also mention Albert Schweitzer, Martin Werner, and Fritz Buri, who so thoroughly tied the historical figure of Jesus to an unfulfilled promise of an immediate, apocalyptic end of history that Bultmann’s kerygmatic Jesus, speaking to us in the eschatological now, seemed to many to be the only way out of the supposed failure of the historical Jesus.

Undoubtedly there is much that divides these schools. Nevertheless, they are united by a common motive: a desire to abstract the meaning of Jesus from the particularities of his historical setting. This desire, which Georges Florovsky has called a perpetual companion and peril of Christian theology since the days of Justin Martyr (c. 110–c. 165), was stigmatized again in 1959 by Pannenberg as common to both major “modern” schools:

Their common starting-point can be seen in the feeling that historical-critical research no longer left any room in its scientific determination of what had actually happened for any redemptive event. For this reason, Heilsgeschichte theology fled into the haven of supra-history or—with Barth—pre-history (Urgeschichte), supposedly safe from the flood of historical criticism. For the same reason, existentialist theology retreated from the objective course of events, which it saw as lacking in meaning and in saving force, back to the experience of the meaningfulness of history in the “historicality” of the individual [in Grundfragen systematischer Theologie, Göttingen, 1967; translation mine].

A less prominent but nonetheless significant equation between the two schools was made in a popular pamphlet by Martin Voigt published in Germany in 1966, What Does Modern Theology Want? Voigt speaks of “three discoveries of recent theology”:

1.the humanity of the Bible;

2.the literary forms of the Bible (form criticism);

3.the central content of the Bible as dialectical theology.

(The evangelical will quickly recognize that the human role in the origin of the Bible is not a discovery of modern theology but is itself a biblical teaching [2 Pet. 1:21, for example]. The scholarly method known as form criticism has brought considerable advances in some areas of our understanding of the biblical documents, but its uncontrolled proliferation has also spread much confusion and misinformation. As to the idea of dialectical theology as the central content of the Bible, this is not merely not a “discovery”; it is positively false. But at the moment it is not our task to challenge the accuracy of Voigt’s analysis; we need only recognize that he reflects what modern theology thinks of itself.)

After having “recognized” these things, theology then turned its attention to the hermeneutical problem, i.e., to the characteristic concern of Bultmann and his successors. Voigt speaks (1) of separating the kerygma from supposedly historical but factually false accounts; (2) of separating it from “mythological” conceptions; (3) of rejecting all interest in the historical reality of a New Testament event such as the Resurrection, because we are concerned only with faith in the Risen One today; (4) finally, of deliberately abandoning every kind of assurance or security in faith, so that existentialist interpretation achieves a new, liberating, “authentic” self-understanding.

Even though dialectical or neo-orthodox theology would not be very happy with Voigt’s second and third steps, it too achieves step 4, and makes it a principle to do away with every trace of assurance or confident possession in our relationship to the Christ whom we approach by faith. Despite dialectical theology’s frequent affirmations of the reality of God’s redemptive action in Christ, Voigt is correct in seeing (a) a lack of interest in history and (b) a programmatic rejection of assurance or security in faith, as common factors uniting the divergent strains of modern theology and giving us the right to speak of it as a unity in some significant respects. An examination of modern theology’s distaste for real history will cast some light on its rejection of security, traditionally one of the great benefits of the Reformation, and enable us to sense something of the fateful nobility—and destined futility—of the courage of the modern theologian.

The Withdrawal from Real History

Professor Willi Marxen, born in 1919, is not only one of Germany’s more prominent figures in New Testament scholarship but also a very precise and clear writer—a particularly praiseworthy quality in a theologian in any age. He has devoted a considerable amount of attention to what seems to be a radically skeptical historical analysis of the New Testament teaching on the Resurrection, well illustrated by his pamphlet The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical and Theological Problem, (Die Auferstehung Jesu als historisches und als theologisches Problem, Gütersloh, 1964). In the second paragraph of this essay, originally a guest lecture in Heidelberg, Professor Marxen warns his readers of the “Babylonian confusion” that often arises in formulating the problem of the Resurrection and says this can be avoided by “a more precise formulation and argumentation.” No fellow scholar will begrudge Professor Marxen his desire for more precision, especially upon noting that in his first paragraph he himself brings a little “Babylonian confusion.” First he quotes St. Paul: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14); then he attempts to explain what the sentence means by putting it slightly differently: “If Christ has not been raised, then our kerygma is without foundation, then your faith is also without foundation.” This means, he says, that “without the resurrection of Jesus, there would be no church.”

The rendering “in vain” in the King James and Revised Standard versions, like the usual German translation leer, seems a better rendering of the Greek kenòn than Marxen’s “without foundation” (ohne Grundlage); Hans Lietzmann in Handbuch zum Neuen Testament renders it “without content” (ohne Inhalt). Marxen’s substitution of “foundation” for “content” is immediately followed by the paraphrase of Paul’s argument, which in Marxen’s view means “there would be no church.” The hasty reader can easily overlook the serious implications of this false equation. Recognizing (a) the reality of Jesus’ resurrection and (b) its importance for the life of the Church, he may well fail to note that what St. Paul says is significantly different from Marxen’s interpretation. To say, “Your faith has no content,” is different from saying, “Your faith has no foundation”; and in this context, the difference is very important.

Paul was speaking to a group of people in Corinth who actually constituted a congregation, a part of the young Church, though some of them denied the resurrection of the body. Since they did exist while critical of the Resurrection, Paul could hardly have argued with them, as Marxen postulates. Instead, while tacitly admitting that the Church could exist without a foundation, Paul calls the preaching and faith of such a church empty and futile.

The tragedy of the Church is that it can exist without a foundation; it often does. The tragedy of the theologian is that he can proclaim a message without content, and hold a faith without content. For him to do so is a difficult and dangerous undertaking: it requires the courage of the modern theologian. The courage of the modern theologian lies in this: where the Apostle—and historic Christian theology—saw a logical relation, a meaningful sequence of facts and their consequences, the modern theologian has destroyed the connection, broken the sequences, and—unwilling to lose Jesus entirely—cast himself into the gap.

Perhaps Professor Marxen is not even clearly aware of what he is doing. Where Paul has a logical sequence, Marxen substitutes a functional relation of cause and effect. Paul has the sequence Resurrection (as a historical fact)—proclamation of the Resurrection—faith in the Risen Lord—life of the Church. Marxen does not deny that the life of the Church is contingent upon the Resurrection; but for him it is contingent in quite a different way than it was for St. Paul. As his writings show, Professor Marxen feels that the historical evidence prevents him from believing that the Resurrection actually took place, or even that the apostles reported it as a fact (he contends that they only reasoned, on the basis of their visionary experiences, that it must have been a fact). So the argument of Paul, from the fact of Christ’s resurrection to the content of his own preaching and then to the faith of the Church, is impossible for him to follow. Nevertheless, he is unwilling to abandon what he calls “the cause of Jesus” (die Sache Jesu). Since he cannot deny that the Easter message caused the Church to come into being but finds it impossible to accept the logical, rationally comprehensible content of the Easter message as the real history of the death and resurrection of the divine-human Saviour, Marxen—like many others—is forced to connect the Easter story with his own faith today in a different way: in a contentless, non-rational way. Therefore, where Paul says “without content,” Professor Marxen says “without foundation.” The Resurrection is no longer for him the rational content of Christian proclamation and faith, as it was for St. Paul; it is the mysterious, misunderstood incident that triggered the faith of the church—and also, almost accidentally, the imaginative, interpretative reports of the evangelists. He wants, somehow, to hold onto the response of faith to the Easter visions, even though he cannot accept the Easter message—and that requires a special kind of courage.

The Need for Courage

Professor Gerhard Ebeling has written these words in The Nature of Christian Faith:

It takes courage to jump off the ten-meter board into the water. It takes courage to entrust oneself to the parachute which only opens once one has started to fall, and to throw oneself into the yawning deep. It takes … incomparably more courage in the last analysis not to rely upon anything at all in the world, but to fall, so to speak, through everything into God. (Das Wesen des christlichen Glaubens, Tübingen, 1959, p. 119).

Naturally a practical man is not readily convinced that the life of the modern theologian is more daring than that of the paratrooper; yet there is something in Professor Ebeling’s statement. There is something incomparably difficult about having no one and nothing to trust, and proclaiming precisely that as “good news.” Thomas J. J. Altizer, a more radical “modern” than either Bultmann, Marxen, or Ebeling, a man who can hardly claim that his theological opinions are scientific, says that his kind of “radical Christian” must accept being banished from every hope in a transcendent life or power, and that “he has chosen a darkness issuing from the death of every image and symbol of transcendence …” (The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Philadelphia, 1966, p. 139). Altizer’s strange idea that a real resurrection would destroy the meaning of Christ comes, not from the New Testament, but from Hegel, Blake, and Nietzsche, and neither Marxen nor any other reputable New Testament scholar would follow him to those sources. But is Marxen’s view so different? He says: “We must ask precisely this: What right do we have to speak Christianly of the resurrection of Jesus?” (op. cit., p. 34). Then he tells us that we can speak of the Resurrection only if we are willing to use “older terminology” and “know the absolute limitations of this terminology.” In other words, we can talk about the Resurrection only if we know enough about the terminology to know that it can’t possibly mean that Jesus rose from the dead.

What does it mean, then, when, in the light of such an analysis, Marxen concludes his inquiry with the affirmation: “Therefore I can confess today: He lives; He did not remain in death. He has risen”? Perhaps less as a critical historian than as a spiritual heir of the Enlightenment, Marxen feels that a “horrid trench,” to use Lessing’s expression (ein garstiger Graben), separates the real events of the life of Jesus from modern man in his need to find a meaning for his life. Unable to bridge the trench with his scholarship, having in fact contributed to breaking down the bridges that exist in the minds of others, and yet unwilling to lose contact with the mysterious and inspiring figure of Jesus, he throws himself into the trench and exclaims, after thirty pages of qualifications, “He has risen.”

The Icy Slopes of Modern Theology

Many modern theologians, then, manifest a remarkable desire to hold fast to Jesus together with a zeal to break down what we have called the logical, rationally meaningful connections between the events of his time and ours. This attitude requires a kind of courage, just as Ebeling claims. It also requires a powerful and energetic mind. Therein lies part of its attraction for theological students, as well as its Achilles heel for theologians and others alike.

Understanding traditional theology requires no specially powerful imagination. Of course, the redemptive events described in the Apostles’ Creed ultimately remain mysteries; but in their literal meaning they can be stated and grasped, and their relevance to the individual man today clearly seen. If Jesus really rose from the grave on the third day, and if he offers me a like resurrection if I believe in him, that is easy enough to grasp. But if he did not rise, if instead the apostles interpreted their own enthusiastic experiences by talking of a resurrection, then considerable imaginative power is needed to make it clear just why and how that should be significant for me today. The young theologian is naturally tempted to follow a system that makes the contemporary relevance of the Resurrection dependent on his own powers of comprehension and persuasion. (Thus Marxen says, “If I know the absolute limitations of this terminology.…”)

Quite apart from the historical or factual difficulty involved (the very strong case in history and faith for the literal, historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead), this position has a practical difficulty for the theologian: holding onto it is difficult. Marxen throws himself into the historical-critical gap, trying with a bizarre courage to hold to the Jesus who is vanishing in his historical inquiry. But others, many others, let go. Altizer is an extreme case. But—to name some other Americans—Schubert Ogden reduces Christian faith to nothing more than man’s possibility of authentic existence; for Paul van Buren, Jesus only happens to be our liberator rather than Socrates. Examples of theologians who have lost their footing on Marxen’s icy ground could be multiplied.

The ordinary man, less inclined to attempt feats of intellectual concentration, to hold together a paradox by his own mental force, seldom even begins to follow the modern theologians into these speculative fields. It is seldom remarked but very significant that despite the evangelistic intention of Bultmann, Robinson, Marxen, et al.—that is, despite their desire to make it easier for modern, twentieth-century man in some sense to accept the Gospel—modern man does not run to them for religious help. Those who think that Christianity may have the answer usually turn to Billy Graham or to another preacher with a clear, comprehensible message. Or some searchers wander into the perfumed gardens of real or ersatz Oriental mysticism. Very few indeed turn to modern theologians in the quest for real answers to ultimate questions. In the non-intellectual man, this may be laid to intellectual sloth—but can we fairly say that Jesus came to bring his message only to those of Kierkegaardian mental powers? And the intellectual who is not a theologian—the attorney, doctor, scientist—seldom has either the leisure or the inclination to tax his mind by attempting to make it alone bridge the gap between Jesus and modern man.

The courage of the modern theologian must be recognized. It is a strange and fatal kind of courage, admittedly. Ultimately it is rather like the courage of Dr. Faust in the earliest versions of the Faust story, who realized that God could forgive him even his pact with the devil if he would repent and claim the finished work of Christ but who resolved, for the sake of his honor, to keep his word to the devil. There is something manly about Dr. Faust; we all are attracted to rebellious courage. But to rebel against the truth of the universe is not only courageous—it is fatal. To step out onto modern theology’s icy slopes takes courage, perhaps not quite the same courage as that of Professor Ebeling’s parachutist or of the martyrs who witnessed with their blood, but still real courage. It is a foolhardy courage, however, because it flies in the face of truth. The “honor” of Dr. Faust is not something for us to emulate. And very few modern men do in fact follow the modern theologian in his mentally anguishing, self-sacrificial leap into the gap.

The Historicity of the Resurrection

Perhaps the strangest thing about all this courage is that, in the name of history, it also flies into the face of history. As the recent discussion of the Resurrection in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (April 12 issue) shows, theologians’ doubts about the resurrection of Christ spring far more from philosophical presuppositions than from historical evidence. Henri-Irénée Marrou tells us that it is the philosopher in the historian who causes the past to lose its concrete reality and become nothing but a depot of philosophical truths, and he rightly observes that this is a source of perpetual irritation to the pure historian, (De la connaissance historique, Paris, 1954, p. 256). As Pierre Barthel observes about Bultmann, he has set for the historian the three-fold task of doing, at one and the same time, historical-critical research, existential analysis, and theology on the basis of salvation by grace alone—an extremely complex task (Interpretation du langage mythique et théologie biblique, Leiden, 1963, p. 80). It seems fair to observe that such a philosophical, existential, theological task can only obscure the historian’s ability to see what really happened and its overwhelming importance for the history of the individual and of the world.

Perhaps Pannenberg is not quite right when he suggests that the Resurrection should be accessible, through ordinary history, to any investigator of good will. There is a role for faith, for only by faith and through the Holy Spirit can we really grasp the truths of the Gospel. And this is not a weakness of our position, something to which to turn when knowledge fails us; it is a strength, a legitimate means of access to true knowledge about what really happened in our space and our time. As Auguste Lecerf says, “What must be understood is the epistemological legitimacy of the method of dogmatics which has as its internal principle the faith (fides qua creditur) which the Spirit of God attests as being His work (testimonium Spiritus Sancti)” (Du fondement et de la spécification de la connaissance réligeuse, Paris, 1938, p. 10). By epistemological legitimacy he means, for example, that faith in the Resurrection is not a substitute for a knowledge of what actually happened, but it is precisely the real grasping and understanding of what happened.

The modern theologian, then, is a lonely man, and in a sense a courageous man. He has taken it upon himself to stand in the gap between the eternal truth of God and the meaningfulness of an individual man. But the task is too big for him. Perhaps there is a kind of Faustian nobility about attempting it, but it is a fatal nobility, for it leads, in Altizer’s expression, to banishment from every hope—in fact, to taking the total absence of tangible hope, i.e., despair, and renaming it hope. And it is unnecessary as well as futile, for there is One who was sent by God to fill the gap, to give us time-bound creatures a meaningful, living relationship to the Eternal God. This One came into our history, into our space and time. His footprints can still be found there, visible to the eyes of the historian as well as to the eyes of faith. What happened with Jesus of Nazareth has meaning not because of our courage and ability to interpret and revalue the kerygma but because of who he was—and is.

- More fromHarold O. J. Brown

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One feature of this year’s American Baptist Convention, in Boston’s War Memorial Auditorium, was a spirited panel discussion on “Technology, Modern Man, and the Gospel” that brought together Dr. Harvey G. Cox, associate professor of church and society at Harvard Divinity School, and Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Their exchange was moderated by Dr. George D. Younger, program associate of the Division of Evangelism, American Baptist Home Mission Society.

Younger: Our problem this morning is a very real one, for we live in and are shaped by and must witness in the middle of a technological society. We cannot talk about modern man as if he were someone apart from us, for each of us is a modern man or a modern woman. And when we talk about the Gospel and the Church, we again are talking about ourselves. This morning we are gathered here as American Baptists with two churchmen who are part of our fellowship. On your right is Harvey Cox, on your left Carl Henry. I’m going to ask each of them in his own way to say what he feels is the heart of the problem as we in the Church seek to address the Gospel to modern man in a technological society—perhaps a better way to put it might be: to understand what the Gospel is, as we ourselves are part of a technological society. Now, we haven’t even agreed which one is to go first. Who’d like to start out?

Cox: Well, thank you George. First of all I’d like to welcome all of you to Boston, which is the home of Harvard University, the place where in the middle of the seventeeenth century President Dunster was fired as the president of Harvard for becoming a Baptist. They’re nicer to us now. I want to say also that this is a very auspicious and interesting way for Dr. Henry and me to have a conversation about theology. Very frequently, theological dialogues in the past have been phrased in categories about which people understood beforehand where the differences were. Today we’re going to talk about the problem for which no theological position has finished answers, the problem of modern man and technology, and I for one look forward to a very profitable exchange. Let me say at the very outset that by technology today I will mean the tools and processes by which we reduce the relative costs of the enterprises that man is engaged in—the application of scientific know-how to the reduction of the relative costs of the various enterprises that man engages in. This means that we have to make choices that we have not been called upon to make before. Many of the things which took care of themselves in previous centuries now are on the agenda of choice for human beings. For theology, for the Gospel, I think this means two things.

First of all, we have to ask the question asked by the Psalmist in a new way: What is man that Thou art mindful of him? What is the place of man in history and the cosmos? What is his appropriate task and mission? Here I think the answer has to come for me from Christology, recognizing that in Jesus Christ we have a disclosure not only of who God is for man but, from my point of view, also a disclosure of who man is for man—an image, a metaphor, a normative instance of who man is and who he is called to be.

I think, secondly, the challenge to theology is the translation of the vision of the Kingdom of God into a vision of what we should strive and work and pray for on this earth, in this world. We’re talking about the transformation of the kingdoms of the world into the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, and I take this very literally: the transformation of the earth into the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom of God as we know it and confess it in the Bible is phrased in metaphors—the lion lying down with the lamb—which have to be given a certain political and social cogency for our time. So I think this is the theological task: asking “who is man?” and dealing once again with the Kingdom of God.

Younger: Dr. Henry, let’s hear your definition of the heart of the problem.

Henry: By technology I mean applied science devoted to the systematic manipulation of the material aspects of civilization. And as such it today holds, of course, not only vast creative potential but also frightening destructive potential. Perhaps it is the secret carrier of a nuclear spasm that will explode all human achievement, or the carrier of the automation of production that will consign mankind to a global breadline, or the carrier of a new mythology of the secular city, with a materialistic determinism of modern life. I agree that we must ask earnestly whether sooner or later it may not encompass all human endeavor and radically alter every man’s way of living.

Modern man I find somewhat more difficult to define, since man is always fundamentally the same and human history shows less change than constancy. Modern man can be projected two ways. First, anybody so fascinated by material techniques and things that he disregards and demeans the supernatural: for example, in Boston, a Harvard graduate who is a disciple of my colleague Harvey Cox rather than Nathan Pusey. Or secondly, and I think this is the preferable definition, anybody who is earnestly involved in the modern conflict of ideas and ideals.

Now by the Gospel I mean God’s message of Christ’s death and resurrection for sinners that offers the secular city forgiveness of sins, spiritual life, and enduring hope. And I would just comment that the very arrangement of our topic is curiously modern: the Gospel stands last, as an appendage of tertiary concern, and technology has the priority as the real issue of the day. Modern man stands between these as the great arbiter of human destiny. Whereas the fact is that the Gospel is the decisive issue, and man—whether he’s pre-modern, modern, or post-modern—will be judged by what he does with God. Technology is simply the latest human colossus, and its moral tone turns ultimately on man’s response to the God of justice and the God of justification.

Younger: Now, Dr. Henry, I think you’ve already joined one issue that we had better get out of the way immediately, since Dr. Cox is the author of a book, The Secular City, and you mentioned the mythology of the secular city. I wish you’d explain that a little bit further.

Henry: Well, as I see it, the secular city (at least as Dr. Cox espoused it in his earlier volume) seeks to detach modern man and all of his responsibilities from any answerability to the supernatural, and from the idea that there are created orders, structures in society by which society is permanently bound; it tends to prefer a wholly open and fluid society, open to the future in the sense that the past is in no way binding and decisive for us. I regard this as a secular alternative to the biblical conception of the Kingdom of God. I share the vision, certainly, of the transformation of the earth into the Kingdom of God. What I dispute is the idea that modern socio-political ideals are to be assimilated directly to the New Covenant, and that we are, like the theocracy of the Old Testament, to have a priestly class that somehow makes direct political inroads and determines the structures of society for the generation in which we live.

Younger: It sounds to me right now as if you’re going on from where you tried to draw the issue to add a couple more. Let’s stick with where you drew it. And that was on the detaching of man from answerability to the supernatural and this fluid situation it assumes. Would you like to speak to that?

Cox: I think it’s very good that we have joined the issue early, because I would like to point out where I do differ quite basically from my colleague at this point. I do not think that man is bound to the past. And I think that the Christian announcement that God forgives us of our sins, that he promises a new kingdom of love and justice, is the power which releases us from the grip of the past, both individually and socially. I think the past is there for us to learn from, to celebrate, to remember; but we are not prisoners of the past, and this is exactly the way I understand St. Paul’s interpretation of our forgiveness that God makes possible. He does open the future for us. This is the meaning of the resurrection. We do not have to live bound with patterns that have been established in the past. We do have the responsibility to make changes if we feel these are more appropriate to our response to what God requires. I’m not nearly as suspicious of the material, I think, as Dr. Henry is. And I start here from the incarnation—that God shares and becomes a part of the material universe. William Temple once said that Christianity is of all the religions the one that is most materialistic. And I give thanks for such materialistic things as penicillin and X-ray and other gifts of modern technology.

Finally, on this business of the supernatural, I don’t see how anyone could read The Secular City without recognizing that I am suggesting that man is answerable in a colossal way to the God who created the world and places man in that world and makes him responsible. I even have a book called God’s Revolution and Man’s Responsibility. Now, as far as the supernatural is concerned, I’d simply like to say that I think that a division between the natural and the supernatural is not something we have to get hung up on. I think our problem as Christians is that we have accepted a scientific, rationalist description of what is natural, and therefore we’ve had to say God is supernatural. I would say that God is preeminently and ultimately natural, that he works in, with, and under the natural processes of history, of nature, and that we don’t have to dichotomize his world into natural and supernatural anymore. That’s a nineteenth-century debate that I don’t even want to enter into.

Younger: Would you like to say something more from the nineteenth-century before we move on?

Henry: I’d like to go back, sir, to the first century. Just a passing comment on natural-supernatural. I share the protest against the modern, restricted, arbitrary definition of the natural. The natural is what God wills habitually, and I want to insist on that. But the only alternative to supernaturalism that I know is naturalism, and I don’t want to be stuck with it.

Now, the real issue that I want to get back to is this one about not being tied to the past and the resurrection having opened a path to the future, because I think that this is strategically important for us in the panel. It is true, of course, that the resurrection opens for man trapped in sin a wholly new option for the future. But it is wholly new only in the sense that it is possible for him in terms of redemption to recover God’s purpose for man on the basis of creation. It’s a cheap victory, I think, to debunk the emphasis on orders of creation and orders of preservation that are divinely willed in history as sort of a deification of the status quo, because the orders of creation are only as static as the Creator and Preserver of the universe wills them to be. I grant that these orders are often violated by secular forces in power, but there is no merit in an anarchic reaction to injustice.

Younger: Excuse me, could you give those who are here a little more specific example of what you mean by orders? I’m not sure we know what you mean.

Henry: I’ll give you a good example, in that monogamous marriage is divinely willed for man on the basis of creation. This is fixed and given. It is not something wholly fluid, and the resurrection of Christ doesn’t open a new way for man in history on the basis of it. Man is born into a life that’s already structured, not simply by a moral consensus in society, but by God’s plotting of nature and man and history—his purpose.

Younger: But does the resurrection have anything to say to monogamous marriage? You’ve said it recovers God’s intention for the orders. Now, in what way does it recover it in marriage, the example you’ve used?

Henry: It publishes the fact that injustice and immorality cannot prevail and that human nature as it is lived in obedience to Christ, and in obedience to his word, is the only type of human nature that can look hopefully into an eternal future.

Younger: Harvey, using the same example—monogamous marriage—how would you see the future being opened by the resurrection?

Cox: Well, I’m not against monogamous marriage. I think it’s a fine institution. It’s not perhaps the one that is most directly relevant to the question of technology and technological change as others might be. I do think that one would be hard put to show that there is a clear certification of monogamous marriage for all people in the New Testament. As I recall my New Testament, it’s for bishops but not for everyone. However, I happen to be in favor of it for everyone. I think the real question here.…

Henry: Sir, Jesus was talking to the Pharisees when he reiterated what was so from the beginning, not to bishops.

Cox: Well, I really don’t think I want to talk about monogamous marriage. I would like to talk, however, about the restoration of the purpose of God in creating man. And I think that’s a phrase that I would latch on to, this phrase that Dr. Henry just used, and then ask the question, What is God’s purpose in creating man? To what are we restored and called in God’s act of redemption? Here I would say that clearly, for me, it’s to have dominion over the earth, to tend the garden, to be the one who has dominion over the creatures, to give them their names—in other words, to exercise the kind of stewardship and power which man frequently refuses to exercise over the creation for God as an agent who is responsible to God. I just wonder whether we agree on that.

Henry: Yes. I would say that Christianity alone makes technology possible, in the long run, in terms of its view of an ordered universe and all that is implied in this, and that only Christianity can protect technology from arbitrary exploitation of man and the universe. But having said that, and agreeing with your emphasis here, Professor Cox, I am still troubled about this revolutionary approach, which, if it looks upon the action, the breakthrough wherever it occurs, as a manifestation of the will of God, seems to me to sacrifice necessarily the ability to judge adversely even the relatively better, from the standpoint of something superior to it. That is, if the divine orders of creation and preservation need to be replaced, then we’re in worse difficulty with the problem of evil than we think. Actually, instead of narrowing the problem of evil, we’ve widened the problem of evil, as I see it, and I don’t think even the most aggressive and dedicated representatives of the new theology can possibly rescue us from our predicament.

Cox: Well, can I just say that I’ve never been very happy with theologies based on the orders of creation. I don’t think that one necessarily … I think you can have a biblical theology—and I’m sure you’d agree, Dr. Henry—without building it on orders of creation. This is a datable, locatable Lutheran understanding of theology. I would much rather start with the fact of redemption and look at creation from the point of view of redemption and from the point of view of God. That is, my theology, in this sense, is radically Christological; I start with the action of God which then indicates to us the purpose of creation, both as we look back to the original creation of man and as we look forward to the kingdom that breaks in here on our present and to which we are responsible. I suppose my emphasis here would be that as Christians we are more responsible to look forward to the kingdom which God is making possible for man, which began with Jesus Christ, than we are to look back to try to preserve orders of creation. Insofar as man always lives in a political order, always lives in an economic order, in a familial order—to that extent and to that extent only I would accept an orders-of-creation approach. I would say, however, that these are institutions which are malleable and changeable; they have been changed and they will change in the future.

Younger: How do you respond to this business of looking back to orders and looking forward?

Henry: I, of course, consider my theology a theology of redemption, and not onesidedly a theology of creation. It is the redefinition of redemption as mere “demption” that bothers me. Because the biblical view is redemption, regeneration, and God’s recovery of his purpose for man on the basis of the original creation. I would hold the two together. But I think we’ve exploited these differences, and explored them as fully as possible. Let’s get on.

Younger: I’ve got one that I’m afraid, at least the way I’ve heard it, would strike both of your positions. There are those who are pointing out: quite true, Harvey, that Christianity is materialistic, and quite true, Carl, it alone has made technology possible. Historically it’s made technology possible. There are those who are now saying back to us that some of the worst things that we see in technology—the going ahead and raping nature for the use of man—are precisely an outgrowth of a Christian outlook that sees only man as important and doesn’t honor the creation. Now, I wonder how to respond to this line of criticism that’s being made by a great many people today, that Christians are people who only worry about man and what they can get out of the universe.

Henry: I would say that this perversion of the Christian ideal actually has its possibility in the Christian interpretation which made technology possible, but that it is a perversion and that it comes under the judgment of the same God of creation and redemption. But I’d emphasize that, while I stress the incarnation, certainly, it was the incarnate Christ who warned us most against materialism and cautioned us to seek first the kingdom of God and not things. Man’s basic problem, it seems to me, is not his environment nor the tools of technology, but man himself. Peter Drucker of New York University, who was onetime president of the Society for the History of Technology, and who writes in the two-volume work on Technology in Western Civilization that was published last year by Oxford University Press, has this to say: “It was naive of the nineteenth-century optimist to expect paradise from tools. And it is equally naïve of the twentieth-century pessimist to make the new tools the scapegoat for such old shortcomings as man’s blindness, cruelty, immaturity, greed, and sinful pride.” I would say that it’s the human mind and will that needs spiritual and moral correction, and that apart from this man’s creative genius and his human dignity and his human worth are going to degenerate. The basic human problem will not be met by adding to or subtracting from technology.

Younger: What’s your opinion on that?

Cox: I couldn’t agree with that more. It’s entirely my position. I don’t think tools are either the answer or the problem. The problem is man himself. I think we might disagree on exactly what that problem is. I think it’s the problem that man is encapsulated in sin and death, what the Bible calls sin and death, and that the Gospel liberates him, announces his liberation from sin and death, so that he can take responsibility for tools, for his ideas, for his society, for himself, that he doesn’t have to be the victim of the way things have gone in the past. But with reference to your early question, George, which I think is a very good one—that is, the accusation that Christianity in its historical development has laid the groundwork for an overly technologized society—I think there’s truth in that. And I think we gain nothing from denying that the historical development of Christianity has resulted in certain unfortunate phenomena. Here especially as Protestant Christians, I think we can learn from, let’s say, the spirit of the Franciscan, St. Francis, whose first impulse with relation to nature was not how to dominate it, necessarily, but loving nature, celebrating it. He talked about his friends the birds and his brother the fire and his brother the sun. I think we can learn something from that as Protestants. And as Christians I think there are even things we can learn from the non-Christian religious traditions of the world. One doesn’t have to stop being a Christian and a dedicated Christian to recognize that there are insights in these great Oriental traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism from which we can profit immensely. One of them is a kind of respect for nature, a capacity to contemplate nature and not simply always to be manipulating it. I think that in the next century we can learn a good deal from these people which we can integrate with our own Christian starting point.

Younger: Is this respect for and contemplation of nature a part of your outlook, Dr. Henry?

Henry: Oh, yes, by all means. Of course, it’s in the Psalms. The modern scientific approach tends to be largely a technique for mastery and manipulation rather than for contemplation. And the scientist, qua scientist. in his professional capacity, doesn’t know what it is to see the glory of God in nature anymore; as a man, he is of course confronted, as every man is, by the revelation of God in nature. But I want to pick up this other point that Professor Cox has suggested. I think it’s a good one in its own way. This point is that the Oriental religions are saying something to the West at this stage and will be saying something increasingly. And I suspect from what Professor Cox has said that he considers this perhaps to be a larger threat to the Western outlook than that posed by technology. Would you say that?

Cox: I wouldn’t say just a threat. Not just a threat. I think it also has elements of real promise.

Henry: But do you think its significance might overshadow that of …

Cox: Yes, its significance could well overshadow the technological development.

Henry: I think this is so. And I’d like to comment on it for just a moment but from another point of view. It seems to me that all the values of the last 2,000 years—indeed, of the past 4,000 years—now hang in the balances. Almost all problems of modern civilization have now reached the supremely critical stage of a final choice, a final decision. And modern science and modern philosophy and modern theology in the West all seem to be failing to kindle authentic hope. They evade the great issues, they evade the ultimate concerns that have engaged human life and thought in its loftiest creative hours, the realm of spirit, the realm of mind, the realm of conscience, the eternal world, particularly the reality of God and the will of God for man. I think that this attempt to make a basically materialistic response or a merely materialistic response to the real and massive problems that are posed by modern life is inadequate and self-defeating, and that the Oriental religions are speaking to us today. The United States has been involved in military commitments abroad (and I tend to take a positive view of that vis-à-vis Communism, in contrast to some of my colleagues), but despite this commitment, and despite extensive foreign aid, nonetheless we are being criticized today even by the pagan nations of the Orient—so called traditionally—because of our materialistic aspirations and our disinterest in the spiritual and eternal world. I think that this materialistic response in Western society is inadequate and self-defeating. It adds illusion to the misery of the masses and it compounds that illusion.

Younger: I think we’re beginning to get to paydirt here. I’m personally very much aware of the many ways in which that which the Christian vision seems to speak of is already happening. The time when all the nations will flow unto Jerusalem—nowadays they flow to whoever controls the communications satellites, or we remember they all flowed unto Washington at the time of Kennedy’s funeral. In our time we are extremely aware that within every one of our metropolitan areas in this country and within the nation as a whole we are bound up together with each other—everyone, every man. We are bound up in such a way by our past choices that we have every possibility of destroying each other rather than of realizing that sort of fruitful life that we also can see. I’m glad you moved us into this area, Carl, and I’d like to ask Harvey about this final decision. It’s certainly final for our generation, although the thing we’re aware of is that it may be final for the human race.

Cox: I think Dr. Henry’s right about that. We’ve come to a certain crucial crossroads in two ways. One, that we now have in our hands the capacity for self-destruction, not only nuclear self-destruction but psychological self-destruction, and that we therefore have to make choices and enter into a plane of responsibility that is higher and more demanding than our forefathers had. I think that is being made possible for us—and from my own theological point of view, it is God that makes this kind of human responsibility possible. I would want to say in that regard that there are a lot of false hopes in the world, based on science, based on politics, and this is why I emphasized in my opening remarks the job we have to do as Christians in stating the hope of the Kingdom of God in a way that will engage the imagination of modern man. Now the reason why people are hoping in science or in politics is that we have not so persuasively stated and demonstrated the hope of the Kingdom of God that they’re hoping in the Gospel. This is part of our responsibility, and that is why I emphasize it so strongly. It’s a judgment on us as Christians that people do not entertain that hope as seriously as they entertain some of their false hopes. I do think that I would put a slightly different emphasis on the materialism in science—this has come up a couple of times before—than Dr. Henry does. I’m impressed with the spiritual aspects of science. This is not simply a materialistic quest. When one thinks of the mystery of the atom, the mystery of the human body, and the mind, the mystery that reveals itself to advanced scientific investigation and exploration, one finds some of the most spiritually sensitive people in the world now working in scientific laboratories, because they’ve touched the inner mysteries. And I believe that there is something happening there that can’t simply be put down as materialism at all. Because it’s the material universe that God has given us and within which he allows himself to be known, at least in part. The hope that we have to state for the men of our time is one that articulates that promise of the Kingdom of God in a way which engages the imagination of man with all its scientific and political configurations.

Henry: I think that technology can and ought to be used to confront the vacuums that technology itself creates—that is, to confront modern man with the divinely published standards by which men and nations will ultimately be judged, and with the good news of the offer of forgiveness of sins and of new life in Christ and of God’s claim upon life. The crucial issue for modern man, I think, is whether he will recognize that his creatureliness and his sinfulness place limits on the fulfillment of human aspirations, and that the abundant life simply can’t be found in an abundance of material things and in an abundance of sex, or in an abundance of status, or in an abundance of leisure, if we come to the leisure era. Christ’s word is, I think, still the most relevant counsel to the current age: “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all desirable things will come as by-products.” Improved material conditions don’t overcome man’s softness or his moral delusion or corruption. I think there are more wonderful possibilities that can be held out for modern man even than creating parts for wornout bodies, magnificent as that is, or regulating human fertility, or communicating by satellite, or living on artificial food. God can turn sinners into new creatures. And he will raise the dead. And we can enter into our closet and talk to the eternal Spirit. And we can enjoy meat to eat that others cannot see. There’s a city more durable than the secular city—the New Jerusalem—and in it death will be abolished. I think that if modern man devoted half as much interest to the spiritual and moral world as he does to technological efficiency, there would be a staggering religious awakening and a regaining of eternal truth that would make contemporary technology rather than theology seem to rest on a plateau.

Younger: I’d like to put to both of you a situation …

Cox: I’d like to respond, if I could, before you go on. I never quite know whether Dr. Henry is saying something that he has thought about beforehand or responding to the discussion as it’s gone along, because so much of what he says I agree with. I think there’s one point, however, in his last statement which I again would want to at least put a different emphasis on. If I understood him correctly, he said the crucial issue today in the preaching of the Gospel is that man shall recognize his sin and creatureliness. I do not think that is the crucial issue. I think the crucial issue is that man should recognize that he is a forgiven and restored child of God whose powers and responsibilities given to him in the creation are now available to him. That he is also a sinful creature, but that the first thing to say about him is that he is forgiven. The first news of the Gospel is not that you’re a sinner but that God has acted and forgiven you. The Gospel is good news, not bad news. And I want that good news to be the emphasis, and the business about sin and creatureliness which is there to remain as a kind of minor motif, not as the major motif of Christian preaching. I think we’ve emphasized that long enough.

Henry: I would simply say, on this, that I think the first thing to be said to modern man is that his destiny in eternity is unsure and that he is locked up to decision for or against Jesus Christ.

Younger: That could be taken out of context [applause] … his destiny is unsure.

Henry: Perhaps Professor Cox would like to clarify what he said, and I give him opportunity.

Cox: I agree with that. His destiny is unsure.

Henry: That’s quite different from telling him his sins are forgiven and everything is all right.

Cox: I didn’t say everything is all right. His sins have been forgiven. Isn’t that the Gospel, that in Jesus Christ our sins have been forgiven? Believe the Gospel and receive? [Applause.] … I didn’t say everything is all right.

Henry: The New Testament, it seems to me, proclaims, number one, the forgiveness of sins …

Cox: Number one, that’s all we have to … We agree.

Henry: No. Secondly, that he who does not believe is condemned already. [Applause.]

Younger: If we’re going to start clapping up on the basis of who’s for condemnation and who’s for forgiveness, we’re going to be in a terrible state here. [Laughter.] We’ve got to start coming to a close, but I was going to put a problem to both of you. I think it would be one of the best ways to sum up. If you were sitting next to an R & D man from Route 128 who is a member of an American Baptist Church (I was in this situation a day or so ago), and you had to tell him what is the nature of the good news for him, and he is a scientist, how would you say it? I’d like you to use this as your summation; if you want to repeat what you’ve said, do that. But if when you were talking to him personally there’s another way you’d say it, please say it that way.

Henry: I’d say that what God expects of us is that we should love him with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves. And we are all miserable sinners. And if we face the future trusting in ourselves, the God of the universe is more righteous than that, and we will simply inherit condemnation that we have brought upon ourselves. And Christ died for our sins and rose again the third day. And he is the author of hope, in the forgiveness of sins that he provides. And we can know him. And what God has in view for me on the basis of redemption is my restoration to fellowship with the living God, and to holiness, and to the exhibition, in relation to my neighbor, of what it means to be in the service of my holy Father.

Younger: Harvey, what would you point to?

Cox: I think I would try to say very much the same thing but try to explain what I mean by the language that Dr. Henry has just used. What does it really mean today to say that we are miserable sinners? That we’re headed for condemnation? That we’re trapped in sin? That we have hope again? Just repeating these phrases to an R & D man or to anyone else today doesn’t fulfill our responsibilities. I think that as a Christian I have to know him personally. First of all, I don’t like these kinds of theoretical situations, desert island or otherwise. I’d like to know who he is, what’s worrying him, where his hang-ups and fears are. In telling him that he is a miserable sinner (which he is and which I am) or that we’re all headed for condemnation (which we are if we don’t change), how do you put content in these words for a person for whom this kind of language has a hollow ring? That’s my problem. And I don’t think you can simply repeat the phrases. I think you’ve got to know him and to know what you mean and to put it in a kind of language that will cause something to happen in this man so that he really does have hope, so that he really is dedicated to working for a future and a hope which God has made possible, instead of a kind of phraseological solution.

Henry: I would share that.

Younger: I want to point out to all of you that although we have had differences and you’ve noted them, there has been in the discussion also some very important agreement. One, that man is the one who controls technology for good or for ill. Another is agreement on the vision of the Kingdom of God, although described differently. And finally, an agreement that the Gospel, the good news which is announced, must make contact with the man now, but that it relates to his situation and our whole situation—to eternity.

Christianity TodayJuly 5, 1968

My time has come to say farewell to 160,000 fortnightly readers and to go into journalistic exile. This issue officially terminates my twelve-year editorship, in line with executive-committee action a year ago. Beginning in September I’ll devote an academic year at Cambridge University, England, to theological research and writing. I look for fresh perspective on the estrangement of the Church and the world and on the sense of alienation that pervades modern life, and expect to carry forward a still uneasy conscience about modern fundamentalism.

The new editor, Dr. Harold Lindsell, assumes duties in September, and thereafter will determine all content. I shall go off the Board and have no voice in future policy formulation. In mid-March I begin a flexible relationship as editor-at-large. In view of summer staff shortages, however, I am staying through August to coordinate editorial energies.

Our best wishes go to a highly valued member of the staff, assistant editor Dr. Robert Cleath, who has decided to return this fall to the faculty of California State Polytechnic College.

Temporary help on editorial side this summer brings to our ranks the Rev. Edward Plowman of San Francisco; Dr. H. Dermot McDonald of London Bible College, England; and the Rev. Lon Woodrum, Methodist evangelist. Dr. J. D. Douglas of London, esteemed editor of The Christian and Christianity Today, comes for the month of August.

I voice gratitude once again to a gifted staff of co-workers, and to loyal subscribers who consider CHRISTIANITY TODAY a worthy witness to evangelical realities.

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Canadian evangelicals have not yet got the message of Pierre Berton’s book, The Comfortable Pew, even though most would consider the book and its challenge old hat by now. Berton, himself a communicator, faulted the Church for failure to take seriously the mass media, especially radio and TV. This criticism was repeated in the sequel, The Restless Church, in an essay by the well-known television personality Patrick Watson. Marshall McLuhan, Malcolm Boyd, and a host of others have repeatedly sounded a similar theme. Yet little or nothing is happening as a result.

At the time of the Reformation, a man with a Bible in his hands was a supremely modern man—a man with the product of the latest technology (the printing press) at his service. Today evangelicals in Canada act, for the most part, as if radio and TV had not yet been invented. Unlike the Apostle Paul, who was fully committed to flexibility in his evangelistic endeavors—“I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22)—we still persist largely in a blind devotion to yesterday’s methods. This is a real hang-up, to use the current phrase.

Since we are stewards of the Gospel, two factors underscore the urgency of this issue:

1. One cynic has said, There is no god but the electronic tube and McLuhan is its prophet.” The reader may feel that if McLuhan is a prophet, he is a false one; but one idea he has hammered home cannot be ignored. When he says that the medium is the message, we need to listen. The way in which a message is presented is important, sometimes even more important than the message itself. If we continue to rely on antique methods for presenting the Gospel, we are saying loudly and clearly to the world that we have not yet joined the twentieth century. Once this sinks in, the corollary that our message must therefore be irrelevant is adopted almost unwittingly. Yet when Canadian evangelicals talk about mass evangelism, they inevitably have in mind some form of preaching—a monologue or lecture method.

2. The point, nevertheless, is not simply that the mass media are the contemporary way to communicate the Gospel; it is that, in many siuations, they are increasingly becoming the only way. As Harvey Cox has pointed out, the “secular city” today crosses all geographical and cultural boundaries. In the “global village,” men live more and more in remarkably similar urban communities characterized by the ubiquitous high-rise apartment buildings.

These “filing cases for people” that are swiftly dominating the skyline of today’s city are its most symbolic structure. How do we reach apartment dwellers for Christ? The old technique of lay visitation can no longer be relied on, for often even the minister himself cannot gain admission. He is told over the intercom that Mr. and Mrs. Jones are “busy”—and that’s that.

We know, however, that in the evening, after Mr. and Mrs. Jones have come home from the office and had dinner, they draw the curtains, pour themselves a drink, and turn on the radio or television set. Hidden away in an anonymous retreat, they put out their antennas and tune in to the communicating world outside. What do they hear from us? Hardly anything.

This is not to say that there is no religious radio and TV programming in Canada; obviously there is. But candor demands the admission that most of what is being done falls very wide of the mark.

Evangelical churches often take the matter seriously enough to get involved; and yet they persist, in the main, in a “hard sell” gospel-music-plus-sermon approach that turns off all but the already converted. Thousands of dollars are spent in an effort that purports to be outreach but actually turns out to be a conversation among Christians. These programs have a pastoral value, no doubt; but they are not reaching the world to which we have been sent.

The churches bring to the modern media their own prepackaged programs, taken more or less straight out of a church-service setting, and insist that they be sent out as they are. Not only is that strategy bad; it is based on a failure to appreciate the real theological basis for Christian communications.

At the risk of over-simplification, this theological basis can be summed up under two points: (1) Our God is a communicating God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ and has called us who worship him to be communicators also. (2) As One who communicates himself, God takes this world as it is seriously—so seriously, in fact, that the Word became flesh for all. It is this incarnational aspect—this taking the world seriously—that has been neglected. We cannot pretend to take the media seriously so long as we dictate the terms on which we will condescend to use them. They have their own “flesh” that can become the medium for the Gospel only as we face the cost of emptying or humbling ourselves for the task.

Our shortsightedness becomes very apparent if we ask: How many churches consult their laymen who are involved in broadcasting before they decide on the content and style of religious broadcasts? A Christian radio-station manager said to me the other day, “In all my years of radio I have never once been asked for my opinion on how to communicate the Gospel by an official of my church.”

This failure is reflected in the larger stations’ gradual elimination of all religious programs. One large Toronto station can show a significant listening increase (and consequent financial profit) since it discontinued its religious broadcasting.

On the other hand, those in the big denominations who do take advantage of the media so often end up with a watered-down version of the faith that once again any evangelistic thrust is nullified. Indeed, some of the ablest communicators seem to go out of their way to disparage the beliefs they are supposed to represent.

All of this might lead us to despair, were it not that we serve the Lord of all hope and have been promised his Holy Spirit, the Chief Communicator, as our guide.

Evangelicals must wrestle with this problem until some answers appear. It is not necessary to accept an either-or; we can use the media effectively and yet present the eternal Gospel. If current experience shows that the “Hot Line” format and the paid religious commercial are the forms most acceptable to radio and TV at present, then we must concentrate more effort there. And conferences for laymen with communication skills are a must if we mean to tackle the job seriously. It is still not too late to hear and obey the challenge:

Give the winds a mighty voice—

Jesus saves!

—T. W. HARPUR, professor of New Testament, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada.

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Archives

At 3:13 A.M. (EDT) today the summer of 1968 begins. Longstanding predictions say it will be “long, hot”—euphemisms for riotous, bloody.

Racial discussion in the American and Southern Baptist Conventions took the spotlight the first week of June (see page 39), but the same topic was prominent in the councils of most Protestant groups. Black caucuses formed within many.

The National Council of Churches had already urged its churches to replace regular Sunday-school classes with study of the urban crisis. Some 200 black militants and community organizers joined churchmen at a closed meeting in Washington, D. C., to set up a “communications network” for the summer.

In New York, church and community agencies quietly formed an Urban Crisis Task Force to help Mayor Lindsay in case of riots. In riot-scarred Detroit, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese began a $1.5 million fund-raising drive, with most of it to go to urban ills. The church council in Portland, Oregon, decided to find at least 1,000 jobs for Negroes.

Here is a sampling of what the denominations are doing:

United Methodist Church—Last month the national division of the mission board allocated $680,000 for ecumenical, UMC, and community groups dealing with racial and poverty problems. $400,000 of the total wiped out a fund that had been put aside for such an “emergency.” The mission board has also set aside a $3 million fund for loans to ghetto enterprises, with the first $100,000 loan going to a Pittsburgh housing project.

Information packets keyed to the NCC’s urban-crisis program went out last month, but the Methodists have developed a more distinct educational effort. They are producing a nightly telephone talk show on racial issues over a network of two dozen radio stations. Host of “Night Call” is Del Shields, head of the Negro announcers’ association. The guest on the first program June 3 was Poor People’s campaigner Ralph Abernathy.

Episcopal Church—Twenty-seven grants to community organizations May 21 raised the total of gifts this year above $500,000. Projects must be efforts to develop power for the poor, rather than just services, and the money is given with no strings attached. In addition, the denomination has given $200,000 to a national community-organization group, with $500,000 more on its way. Earlier this year, $50,000 was set aside for emergency grants to local Episcopal efforts.

United Presbyterian—A new Council on Church and Race led by the Rev. Edler Hawkins will preside over race and poverty efforts, which got major attention at last month’s national assembly (see previous issue, page 39).

Presbyterian Church, U. S.—The Southern denomination’s education board, following the NCC suggestion, is urging all churches to replace regular Sunday-school curricula with an eight-week course whose materials include the Kerner Commission report.

American Lutheran Church—The educational drive led by new urban-crisis executive H. ManfordKnudsvig to “rout out racism” among church members was to climax with congregational meetings and sermons this month.

Christian Churches (Disciples)—The denomination is seeking to raise $2 million in the next two years to meet urban problems; the project will be directed by a new five-member steering committee. At its August convention, the Negro convention within the Disciples is expected to plead that most of this money be channeled through black congregations.

Seventh-day Adventists—A spring council meeting voted a $100,000 emergency fund for the denomination’s educational, welfare, and evangelistic efforts in the inner city this summer. Funds will go on a matching basis to local conferences.

MISCELLANY

The government of Israel has agreed to pay for damage to all Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Roman Catholic church property in the 1948 and 1967 wars—whether Israel or Jordan did the damage. The amount of compensation will be fixed later by a panel of experts, Religious News Service reported. The representative of Vatican property rights in the Holy Land, the Franciscan Custody, will give the government two acres of land along the old city wall as part of a parks and beautification program.

Five American missionaries taken by the Viet Cong are reliably reported to be alive and in reasonably good health. Three of them have been in Viet Cong hands for six years. The other two were seized early this year.

The Church of God with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, dedicated a new office building last month. The lobby of the four-story structure features a mural of Venetian mosaic tile portraying the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

A new association of evangelical nationals and missionaries was formed in Japan at a meeting April 29 in Tokyo. Known as the Japan Evangelical Association, the group is said to embrace about 1,000 churches and pastors and more than 800 missionaries. Leaders hope for stepped-up cooperation aimed at church growth.

The largest “faith promise offering” in the history of Toronto’s Peoples Church, $341,504.84, climaxed the church’s fortieth annual world-missions conference. Park Street Church, Boston, which conducts a similar conference, reported $293,531.04 this year.

Seven hundred persons professed faith in Christ in three stadium rallies that concluded American evangelist John Haggai’s campaign in Djakarta, Indonesia. Final night attendance was 8,000.

A Franciscan custodian complained that an improvised service held by some 300 Pentecostal pilgrims in the Cenacle or Upper Room on Mount Zion “did not seem to be quite kosher.” The service, held on Pentecost Sunday, included songs and prayers in a number of languages. A protest was expected to be lodged with the government.

Two groups that have been seeking to influence the American ecclesiastical scene announced their dissolution last month. One was the Fellowship of Concern, an organization of liberal Southern Presbyterians begun in 1963. The other was the six-year-old National Committee of Christian Laymen, a conservative, interdenominational group with offices in Phoenix, Arizona.

The National Council of Churches is temporarily suspending several of its publications and replacing them with a weekly newspaper called Approach, which is to be devoted exclusively to information about the urban crisis. The consolidated publication will be put out jointly with the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

New York Mayor John Lindsay came under fire for recommending elimination of 47 of the 129 chaplains employed by the city. New York is the only major American city with paid fire, police, and sanitation chaplains. Their average salary is $5,000 a year.

The Upland School of Social Change at Crozer Theological Seminary is being renamed after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King is a graduate of the seminary, an American Baptist institution in Chester, Pennsylvania.

A campaign is under way to raise $800,000 to endow a program in black-church studies at Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

Funeral services were held at Washington Cathedral for Helen Keller on June Miss Keller, 87, one of the world’s most admired women because of the way she overcame both blindness and deafness, was a Swedenborgian. Her ashes were interred in the columbarium of the Cathedral beside her friend and teacher, Mrs. Anne Sullivan Macy.

William H. Crook, 44, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, was named U. S. ambassador to Australia. He is a graduate of Baylor University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and also took graduate work in Edinburgh. He has been working in antipoverty and VISTA programs.

Deaths

DANIEL L. MARSH, 88, Methodist churchman who was a former president and chancelor of Boston University; in St. Petersburg, Florida.

WARNER SALLMAN, 76, artist whose Head of Christ painting was reproduced more than 100 million times; in Chicago.

VICTOR E. CORY, 74, who founded Scripture Press, independent evangelical publisher of church educational materials; in Wheaton, Illinois.

PERSONALIA

Dr. John C. Bennett says he will retire in 1970 from the presidency of Union Theological Seminary, New York. Bennett, who has headed the school since 1964, will be 68 in July of 1970.

Dr. Thomas J. J. Altizer, around whose death-of-God theology a storm raged, is leaving Emory University (Methodist) to become a professor of English literature at the University of New York at Stony Brook.

Actor-clergyman R. Gary Heikkila was elected president of the Finnish Congregational Mission Conference of America.

G. M. Kuitert is succeeding the noted European evangelical theologian G. C. Berkouwer at the Free University of Amsterdam. Berkouwer is going into semi-retirement.

Dr. Bernhard W. Anderson, former dean of the School of Theology at Drew University, will become professor of Old Testament theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a Methodist clergyman. Princeton is also adding a Lutheran to its faculty: Dr. Karlfried Froehlich, a layman who has also taught at Drew.

Dr. Wendell G. Johnston has been named president of Detroit Bible College.

The Rev. Frederik Herman Kaan was appointed chief executive officer of the International Congregational Council.

Government officials in the nation’s capital called upon a member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to mediate a labor dispute. He is the Very Rev. Msgr. George G. Higgins. The dispute centers on the refusal of Washington bus drivers to carry change money at night because of numerous holdups. One driver was recently shot to death.

Evangelist Jack Wyrtzen attracted a total attendance of more than 30,000 for six rallies in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Crusade sponsors reported 794 recorded decisions for Christ.

HenrykCiszek, 51, a Pennsylvania-born evangelist of the Churches of Christ, was indicted in a Warsaw court last month on charges of illegally organizing churches and spreading slander against the government. The slander accusations grew out of a tape recording about alleged discrimination against Christians. Ciszek was said to be planning to take the tape to North America.