Page 6065 – Christianity Today (2024)

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While millions of prosperous Americans were cooling themselves at waterside resorts last month, violence exploded again in the heart of U. S. cities. Ghetto after ghetto swarmed with rioters, policemen, and armed soldiers. By month’s end, the long hot summer had turned more than a dozen cities into a purgatory of hatred, looting, arson, demagoguery, and death.

Those who still think that the term “the great society” is appropriate for our land should tremble before the warning signals of a declining culture. The state of New Jersey, which a few weeks earlier had hosted the Johnson-Kosygin summit meeting in quest of world understanding, found itself struggling in Newark for the basic elements of civil order. Fires had hardly died out in Newark when a week of unprecedented fury left blocks of downtown Detroit in rubble. At least twenty-seven people died in Newark, forty-one in Detroit. Thousands were injured. Property damage approached $300 million. In the same few days similar violence shook Plainfield and Englewood, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, Cambridge, New York, Erie, Phoenix, Cincinnati, and a host of other cities. And still it did not seem that the end was in sight.

As Americans paused to reflect on the weeks of violence, two things appeared certain. First, the angry wave of violence was rising rather than subsiding, in spite of the massive efforts of government and private agencies to contain it. It also seemed that the rioting was only one wave in a rising tide of violence that increasingly threatens American society and the long-range survival of basic Western values.

In the past three years, serious disorders stemming from racial unrest have immobilized parts of more than fifty cities. But thirty of these outbreaks have occurred within the past twelve months. And at one point in the recent outbreaks, Chet Huntley announced on NBC television that violence had occurred in a dozen American cities simultaneously within the preceding twenty-four hours.

Actually, the violence was even more widespread. The evidence lies in the increase of crime across the widest possible spectrum of American life. United States Court of Appeals Judge Warren E. Burger reported recently that “people murder others in this country at the rate of more than one for every hour of the day. There are more than 140 crimes of theft every hour; assault and violence and rape grow comparably.” Moreover, the large amount of crime committed by persons under twenty suggests that the worst is yet to come, and the crimes are hardly restricted to the inner city. Violence has assumed such proportions on television, in plays and movies, and in novels that Esquire magazine asked recently, “Why are we suddenly obsessed with violence?” Has violence become the American way of life?

A partial explanation of the most recent riots undoubtedly lies in the intensified but frustrated hopes of many caught up in the Negro revolution. The way the riots in Cambridge, Maryland, exploded within hours of the provocative speech of black-power advocate H. Rap Brown is evidence of that. But racial unrest does not explain it all. Many Negroes who have been outspoken on behalf of Negro rights did not endorse the violence, yet they were not heard; and few doubted that Negroes suffered most in the destruction.

Poverty and the desperation born of it were also a significant factor, but as an exclusive explanation this too was inadequate. Plenty in the inner city invites exploitation by demagogues. But two days of rioting shook Waterloo, Iowa (population 75,000), where the 6,000 Negro residents are well integrated into the schools and where unemployment is only 2.3 per cent, 1.7 per cent below the national average. In Newark, Negroes suffer all the grimness of a large, downtrodden city; but $2 million in government funds was spent on community projects in the last twelve months, and unemployment has been halved since 1962. This year $30 million is being spent on poverty programs in Detroit. Still the riots occurred. The failure of such large sums to prevent rioting casts doubt on the theory that increased government spending alone can solve the problems in the cities—or anywhere else, for that matter.

The claim that the surge of riots was due in some measure to the successful work of agitators was also to the point, though this work was not in creating a conspiracy so much as in appealing to a basic human lawlessness that thrives today in the moral vacuum of American society. The agitators appeal to the anarchist in man. And if their actions are heinous, as they most certainly are, they are at least no more heinous than similar actions on the part of white racists and those who practice violence for even less justifiable ends. “This is not a Negro rebellion,” said New Jersey’s Governor Hughes. “This is a criminal insurrection.”

For those who agreed, the weeks of rioting called for punishment of criminals and swift restoration of civil order. Said Dr. Martin Luther King in a statement signed by three other prominent Negro leaders: “Killing, arson, looting are criminal acts and should be dealt with as such. Equally guilty are those who incite, provoke and call specifically for such action. There is no injustice which justifies the present destruction of the Negro community and its people.”

For many, the immediate problem was how to recognize genuine complaints and rectify the problems in the ghetto without appearing to reward violence. Unfortunately, it seemed at times that everyone but the rioters was being blamed for destruction while the innocent paid the price.

The long-range problem is the need to restore the basic values of society and to instill the inherent respect for law and order without which no society can function. Although violence itself is not necessarily an evil when controlled by law and exercised in the cause of righteousness, outcroppings of violence in individuals for individual ends must either be restrained or punished.

At the same time, individual Christians and the Christian churches might well be asking what they have done to correct the conditions that breed unrest. A number of the large denominations seem content to pass resolutions about the problems of the slums and to let the government carry on the battle from there. On the local level, many pulpits have been doling out a monotonous endorsem*nt of social-gospel legislation for so long that the man in the pew has lost all sense of personal responsibility. A number of major service clubs are losing members despite the population increase. Few people of means regard their possessions as individual trusts for which they are accountable to God. Some slum lords are pillars in Protestant churches, and those that are not could often join easily if they wanted to.

Many churchgoers are increasingly alienated by an inner circle of churchmen who have put the Church’s trust in inadequate political processes, and not in the realities of spiritual renewal and personal voluntarism. But until the two-thirds of the American people who belong to churches assume a personal obligation in regard to national problems, the Christian community will not be guiltless for the rising tide of violence. Nor will it be showing itself a viable force within this country, much less the salt of the earth.

Jerusalem is now “up for grabs” in the councils of statesmen and churchmen. Both the permanent unity of the “Holy City” and its supervisory authority are controversial issues that threaten to erode Jewish-Christian understanding hard won during the past decade.

The interwoven political and religious strands of the controversy are of long standing. Regathering of the Jews in Palestine and emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 brought to white heat Hebrew-Arab tensions that reach back across Old Testament history; and it also stirred new interest in the prophecies of revealed religion as well as in political messianism.

The capture of Old Jerusalem by Israeli soldiers during the recent Middle East war has put the ancient city on the critical list of problems, not only in the United Nations, but also among the great theistic religions of the world. Increasingly the Jewish community has demanded Christian support on Jewish terms (a telegram sent to the White House, beginning “We Christians,” was reportedly written by Jews). Meanwhile, although many Lebanese are open to de facto recognition of the Israeli state, some Arabs in Egypt bitterly predict another “Armenian massacre” if Christians support the Israeli cause.

Jerusalem, over which Jesus wept, remains a vexing problem. Unless peace and justice emerge in the Middle East, the Arab states and Israel will simply bide their time for another clash. For spuming the 1947 United Nations proposal to internationalize Jerusalem, for refusing to recognize Israel and sealing off Jews from their wailing wall, and for its recent military defeat, Jordan doubtless will pay a heavy price. The Israeli government apparently considers reunification of Jerusalem (it shuns the word “annexation”) to be the only unnegotiable issue arising out of the June 5–10 war. Surely some way must be found to preserve the integrity of Jerusalem. But does sympathy for Israel’s political integrity require sympathy for Israel’s territorial integrity, particularly in the matter of the administration of Old Jerusalem (quite apart from all other Zionist aspirations)?

Dr. H. P. Van Dusen, past president of Union Theological Seminary, warns against Christian approval of the recent Israeli conquest, which he deplores as “the most violent, ruthless (and successful) aggression since Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Western Europe.” Van Dusen argues that “every square mile of Arab homeland appropriated by Israel, every additional Arab subjugated or driven into exile, will merely exacerbate the smoldering resolve for revenge.”

But Reinhold Niebuhr, who twenty years ago led Christian support for an Israeli homeland, with fifteen other theologians now approves Jerusalem’s administrative reunification apparently under Israeli supervision, on the assumption that “Judaism presupposes inextricable ties with the land of Israel and the city of David, without which Judaism cannot be truly herself.”

The Christian Century considers joint administration by Israeli and Jordanian forces the best solution.

The National Council of Churches, through its ad hoc committee on the Middle East, favores an undefined international presence to guarantee security, full access, and protection of shrines.

Pope Paul VI has reduced the ambiguity by proposing internationalization of the holy places. Since the Orthodox and Armenians hold property rights and control over 80 per cent of the traditional Christian holy places (in which Protestants are little interested), some leaders of the World Council of Churches regarded the Vatican’s bid for cooperation by Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras of Turkey as a power play that might minimize Protestant witness in the Holy Land. Coming at the moment of Israel’s need of help in the United Nations, the Vatican move toward tacit acceptance of Israeli control of Old Jerusalem was seen as an effort to strengthen Rome’s position. But though Athenagoras is “first among equals,” he lacks jurisdiction over Jerusalem’s Orthodox Patriarch Benedictos, and the Orthodox Church is a WCC affiliate.

The WCC, in its backstage game of musical chairs with the Vatican, has so far avoided open endorsem*nt or criticism of the Pope’s proposal, though it has appealed for a $2 million relief fund for Middle East war sufferers. The vague NCC proposal of international presence may have pointed toward the U. N.; but that agency, which fled the Gulf of Aqaba and is now hampered by formal and informal vetoes, can hardly inspire real confidence over Zion. Two NCC divisions and the WCC are exploring the possibilities of an inter-faith center in Jerusalem for encounter, study, and action among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. WCC leaders held informal talks this month with Middle East representatives of Orthodox churches and with European church leaders (some almost pathologically pro-Israel in the aftermath of the Nazi crimes).

In this ecumenical casting of lots for Jerusalem, nothing is more apparent than an insensitivity to evangelical concerns.

While ecumenists deplore Israeli use of napalm in fierce fighting in Syria and Jordan, the Egyptian use of poison gas in Yemen, little is said of wanton Israeli damage to evangelical enterprises in Old Jerusalem—including the YMCA, slaughter of the keeper of the Garden Tomb, damage to the Bethlehem hospital. Such violence has raised evangelical anxieties about assurances of protection under Israeli administration. A full assessment should be made of the present status of evangelical efforts in the Old City.

NCC advisers and consultants are in dire confusion about the Gospel and the Jew. Some contend that to evangelize the Jew is anti-Semitic; others share Niebuhr’s notion that Israel is already a segment of Western Christianity. Evangelical Christians consider non-evangelization of the Jew a supreme act of lovelessness. Although the NCC executive committee suggests that Jerusalem might be the proper place to locate “a research institute … bringing together in dialogue for problem-solving the best minds in the Middle East,” its spokesmen seem uninterested in whether the present situation offers a new opportunity to advance the cause of religious freedom in the Middle East. Unlike the Lord of the Church, who did not overlook Jerusalem in the Great Commission, modern ecumenists seem quite unconcerned over ultimate matters. In casting lots for Jerusalem, those who profess to be the friends of freedom ought not to overlook freedom to proclaim the good news.

A delegation of churchmen from the National Council of Churches recently called on Secretary of State Dean Rusk and trumpeted a revised melody on the ecumenical bugle: “We do not believe that either sudden, unilateral withdrawal of the U. S. presence or escalation of the present military effort is defensible.” After repeated ecumenical revelations counseling American forces to halt the bombing and de-escalate, if not go home, this momentary note of realism was sounded at long last in a report that contained nothing Washington leaders did not already know.

The report followed a visit to South Viet Nam, Thailand, and Cambodia (Hanoi refused a visa) by four churchmen: Episcopal Bishop George W. Barrett of Rochester, N. Y.; Dr. Tracy K. Jones, Jr., of The Methodist Church; Dr. Robert S. Bilheimer, director of the NCC’s international affairs program; and William P. Thompson, stated clerk of the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church. Thompson was less a dove than his traveling companions, and Bilheimer—widely regarded as an echo of the Christian Peace Movement—is apparently backing off a bit from the pacifist posture of Union Seminary President John C. Bennett.

Even so, the report did not substantially reverse NCC attitudes toward the Viet Nam conflict. Its overall stance was still one of apology for U. S. involvement (“We regret our inability to visit North Viet Nam, to express the concern of U. S. churches for the sufferings of its people caused by war”; “despite adherence to the same communist ideology, control of Hanoi by Peking cannot be assumed”; is the “U. S. military, economic, and political presence … so vast as to defeat the objectives of freedom and beneficial social change?”).

The report, moreover, perpetuated the basic error of ecumenical social ethics—the idea that it is the proper task of the churches, or even a traveling committee of four churchmen, to tell political leaders when to intervene and when to withdraw, whether or not to escalate, and so on.

Indeed, the report claimed that “the presence of observers on behalf of the Christian Churches” alongside U. N. observers would help Prime Minister Ky’s government assure free and fair elections. This call for observers to watch the elections was as close as the report got to a mission for the Christian churches in its quest for “an early, honorable, negotiated peace” in Viet Nam. In fact, the traveling churchmen had little contact with the churches of South Viet Nam, where really strategic missionary work is being done by non-conciliar churches. If the U. S. presence were now withdrawn, it is likely, in view of Communist practice in North Korea and in China, that Christian leaders of South Viet Nam would be massacred and churches destroyed.

This brings to view the fundamental failure of the NCC in relation to the Christian task force in Viet Nam. That force is twofold—those engaged in missionary and humanitarian service who are not in uniform, and those in uniform and in military and humanitarian service. Assuming that the U. S. servicemen in Viet Nam, numbering about 464,000, reflect the religious proportions of the population at home, roughly 160,000 are from Protestant churches, more than half of these from NCC-related congregations.

American Christian leaders have had a golden opportunity to inculcate in our servicemen a concern both for social justice and for evangelism—and thus to develop a new generation of church members who could effectively transcend the present conflict of evangelism-or-justice. Instead, the conciliar churchmen issue specific policy proclamations along with an appeal to abstract justice (without expounding the revelational content of justice in the biblical understanding, and without really demonstrating that the specific policies they propose are a necessary requirement of a scriptural ethic) and utterly fail to deepen the understanding of justice by sons of the Church serving in uniform. Although the historic confessions of many of the conciliar churches support just wars, few churchmen have debated Viet Nam involvement in terms of justice and injustice. Many have merely been badgered into echoing—or disregarding—particular policy pronouncements (“halt the bombing,” “initiate peace unilaterally”) by NCC strategists. The presumptuous net effect of conciliar declarations that U. S. involvement on the present basis cannot be justified is to place almost half a million Americans—and particularly church-related servicemen and their chaplains—in the service of injustice. Partisan statements of the NCC-WCC policy promulgators imply that men in the armed forces are rather to be pitied than prayed for and supported. We do not say that the rightness of U. S. involvement ought to be taken for granted simply because almost half a million American youths are in Viet Nam (see the editorial, “Viet Nam A Moral Dilemma,” January 20, 1967, issue). What we do say is that the asserted wrongness of the cause has been publicized rather than established. Even when leftist churches pray for their servicemen, these prayers are burdened by an apparent solicitation of God’s aid in the fulfillment of a presumably non-Christian vocation.

The conciliar neglect of evangelism—except as a topic of discussion and debate—compounds this tragedy. In Viet Nam, if the churches were really interested, a new type of American layman could be shaped. Servicemen could be moved to earnest participation in the arenas of private morality, social concern, and evangelistic engagement. Today some radical churchmen are mainly interested in situation ethics and deplore the “purity nuts”; such attitudes do nothing to strengthen the moral fiber of young men away from home in abnormal circ*mstances.

Commendably, many chaplains in Viet Nam have imparted to men facing the prospect of death a realistic view of the issues of social justice involved in the Viet Nam clash and have also pressed the claims of the Gospel upon them. Viet Nam has also proved to be a maturing ground for chaplains; the liberal optimism about human nature and history, and sentimental notions about Communist benevolence and about the dispensability of force in the promotion of peace, do not long survive. A few years ago some NCC spokesmen were trying to get the chaplains out of military uniform, but the idealism associated with such proposals collapsed swiftly when denominational leaders learned what the cost would be if churches rather than government paid for salaries and transportation. The deeper cost, of course, comes from the failure to confront in depth the whole issue of just and unjust war in a day in which the ecumenical establishment calls loudly for social justice and widely publicizes partisan policy proposals without showing how revelation or reason or both lead on from the major premise to the desired conclusion.

The latest NCC report approves the U. S. presence in Viet Nam; but anybody who has served in the military knows that significant presence involves a mission and a goal, and committed forces, and not mere visibility.

Evangelical churches must shoulder their responsibility in this hour. They can help sons of the Church to rise to new awareness of the claims of the Gospel and of social justice upon every man. And men who have carried those concerns through the jungles of Viet Nam can—when God crowns their devotion to peace—help lead a nation to a better day for both the citizenry and the churches.

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The rules governing athletic events are established in advance. Players do not change them to suit themselves. Anyone who attempted to do so would rightfully be ridiculed.

The rules of life cannot be changed at will, either. God has established moral standards for the good of man, and man rejects them only to his own detriment.

History is filled with stories of men and of nations who have thought themselves above God. They have learned to their dismay that “God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Gal. 6:7, RSV).

The most recent attempt to cast aside God’s moral absolutes is a movement advocated even by some within the Church—“situational ethics.” In this view, man determines his behavior, not according to any precepts of God’s revealed truth, but according to his own evaluation of the situation in which he finds himself at any given time.

Let us suppose for a moment this cavalier disregard for rules were applied to sports.

First, let’s look at a baseball game. With a player on first and one out, the batter hits a sharp grounder to short. Cleanly fielded—a throw to second and relay to first and the umpires signal both players “out.”

But a rhubarb starts immediately. The batter claims he hit the ball so hard it should have been fumbled, while the runner thrown out at second yelled that he had made a perfect hook slide, even if the ball did get there ahead of him.

Despite their beefing, a perfect double play has been executed. No amount of arguing can change the umpires’ decisions.

Now on to a football game. The fall classic between Yale and Harvard is under way. The ball is snapped from center and a draw play develops. The left end darts down the field, feints, and hooks back. At that moment the quarterback fires a perfect pass. But just as his teammate is about to catch the pass, an opposing player darts across his path, intercepts the ball, and with a brilliant burst of speed carries it over for a touchdown.

Immediately the quarterback protests to the umpire. He had had perfect protection and his pass had been straight as a die, he says. His intended receiver also protests, saying he had evaded his pursuers and, but for the interception, could well have scored for his team.

But of course it is ruled that there has been an interception and a touchdown, and that the six points counted for the opposing team.

What did the officials say?

The first-base umpire, dean of the National League arbiters, asked, “Wassa matter wid you guys? Ya gone nuts?”

And the referee asked, “Who do you think you are? Do you think you can change the rules in the middle of the game?”

The determination to change the rules finds expression in the new morality, which puts situational ethics into practice.

There is the man whose wife has grown cold and who uses this as an excuse to engage in extramarital relations. Both he and his partner in adultery excuse their action because it is “meaningful.”

A boy and girl in college engage in premarital relations because they can see no reason for restraint and because there are others all around them who condone some fornication as an expression of “love.”

A hard-working man yields to the temptation to gloss over certain items when reporting his income while at the same time he pads his expense account. “Everyone does it,” he says, in trying to excuse himself.

Examples of rejection of the explicit teachings of the seventh and eighth commandments are legion. That God’s laws are broken does not nullify them. When they are deliberately flouted in the name of “morality” or “ethics,” it would seem that the acme of disobedience has been reached. Unless there is genuine repentance, surely there will come the judgment of a holy God.

The breakdown of morality that finds undergirding in situational ethics strikes at the very heart of personal and national life. When breaches of the moral law go uncondemned and are even approved and accepted, the foundations begin the crumble. The psalmist asks, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Ps. 11:3).

Like a deadly gas, unrecognized at first, situational ethics is spreading across our land. Even some within the Church are welcoming and advancing it.

It is high time for Christians to awake and to recognize what is taking place.

One of America’s most popular magazines recently published an article in which a prominent bishop sought to justify adultery under certain circ*mstances.

Also recently, a well-known religious journal carried an article by a university professor of religion who advanced the case for the new morality:

… The free man is continually asking questions about what to do in respect to others: What is Susan’s good? What is, or will be, wholeness for her? What can I do that will speed Susan’s pilgrimage to the holy place of her own unique and complete identity? And from the free woman’s side: What response will help John toward love for a woman who is wholly a woman? Even if he is willing impulsively to jeopardize his future, have I any right to encourage his doing so? What can I do or say that will create a relationship so fresh in all dimensions that no one of them is permitted to destroy the others? Set against such questions, the reductionist’s formula, ‘Yes, if married; no, if not,’ seems merely silly [“Sex and the Single Standard,” by Cyrus R. Pangborn, The Christian Century, May 17, 1967].

What foolishness! Situational ethics is a conception of morals in which there are no absolutes. Man must make his decisions on the basis of undefined “love,” “fulfillment,” “meaningfulness,” and expediency.

This new approach to the temptations of life will have a devastating effect on all who succumb. That it is the subject of discussion on campuses and at young people’s conferences adds to the danger. Without the restraining thought that God has established rules of moral behavior, and that man breaks those rules to his own harm, the whole fabric of society will be attacked by a form of spiritual cancer. The end of it all is inevitable judgment by the sovereign God—the Arbiter of time and eternity.

The Apostle Paul describes people who, “though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die … not only do them but approve those who practice them” (Rom. 1:32).

And again Paul speaks: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from immorality, … that no man transgress, and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we solemnly forewarned you. For God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you” (1 Thess. 4:3, 6–8).

L. NELSON BELL

Christianity TodayAugust 18, 1967

Dear Sons Of The Rising Superchurch:

Last December in our Christmas gift list we put Episcopal Bishop Chauncey Kilmer Myers down for a manual on how to shoot from the lip. A recent statement by this successor to Bishop Pike on San Francisco’s Nob Hill makes it abundantly clear that he has now developed his talents as a theological blunderbuss. In a daring departure from his church’s Thirty-Nine Articles, this “veddy high chu’chman” has said that Protestants should acknowledge the pope “as chief pastor of the Christian family and … joyfully acclaim him as the Holy Father in God of the Universal Church.”

Bishop Myers apparently yearns for the good old days before Henry VIII’s hanky-panky with Anne Boleyn and the consequent separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome in 1535. If we join Chauncey in his voyage home, we can expect experiences that Protestants have missed for four centuries.

First there’s the pomp and pageantry. We will be able to join the acclaim for the humble chief shepherd as he is borne on his throne through the cheering multitudes. We may even have the opportunity to bestow a kiss on the papal ring (or in lieu of this, kiss the worn-down toe of St. Peter’s statue). We may join the poor in gazing at the abundance of gold, silver, and precious stones nestled in the Vatican treasury and realize we somehow have a stake in this wealth.

Next, we will have a final authority on all matters of faith and doctrine. Protestants leery of sola scriptura (the “paper pope”) will, as followers of the Holy See, have church tradition to guide them and, in the clutch, an ex cathedra utterance from the Vicar of Christ. True, our wives will have to stop taking birth-control pills—but only for a while, since we expect that the Holy Father will soon change the immutable and join the Margaret Sanger clan of family-planners. With the pope as our chief pastor we will have the opportunity to embrace a new set of beliefs (the immaculate conception, the assumption of Mary, the apocrypha as Scripture), and be on the receiving end of a steady flow of new dogma.

With all these advantages, I might possibly be willing to accompany Bishop Myers back to Rome if it weren’t for one thing. I’m not sure I could hit it off with the Protestant prodigals returning with him. Maybe I’m too provincial for a Superchurch.

Your roamin’ brother, EUTYCHUS III

How To Get Together

The idea of 45 million evangelicals cooperating in the cause of Christ is one about which all of us should get excited (“Evangelicals Seek a Better Way,” Editorial, July 7). However, the many obstacles to the fulfillment of your great idea, so far as I can see, will prevent such a fulfillment for many years. These obstacles are largely psychological and not without solution, but to get such a large body of people to change their minds about others presents a formidable task indeed.

GEORGE M. BOWMAN

Scarborough, Ont.

Your presupposition (prayer, worship, interchange of ideas, and fellowship) is a reality at our church. Under the direction of the Rev. Ned Richardson, a group of men form what is called a “Play and Pray” group. We meet every Wednesday for basketball, lunch, and prayer.

The uniqueness of this group is that it includes: two Presbyterian ministers, one Evangelical Free minister, one Christian Reformed minister, two Assembly of God ministers, two Youth for Christ men, one Inter-Varsity representative, one David C. Cook Publishing salesman, one school teacher (Catholic), one school administrator, one Baptist minister, and one Campus Crusade for Christ representative.…

Is it not possible that, since a small group at this level have been getting together for two years with a common purpose, we could do it in greater numbers?

RON R. RITCHIE

Director of Christian Education

and Youth

Walnut Creek Presbyterian

Walnut Creek, Calif.

What if Christian women would hold a neighborhood coffee for other Christian women in their immediate neighborhood—there might be as many churches represented as there are women—and present them with the most solemn challenge to meet weekly, not to chat about religion, but, in the light of present-day dangers threatening the welfare and happiness of their families … to begin a weekly prayer time. The purpose of the prayer? To ask God to revive his people, “beginning with me” (and meaning it, of course), and to cause us to become obedient children, imbued with power from on high, in order to carry out the Great Commission by whatever manner he sees fit. And, in case we may not like the method he should choose, ask him to give us discernment to see that it is his method, and to enter into it wholeheartedly, nonetheless.

WILMA LITTON

Espanola, N. Mex.

One thought I had … would call for … a Bible-study group … run by evangelicals, and taught by an evangelical. This group would invite any person from any denomination, who would have only to claim the Bible as divinely inspired and as the sole authority for the group study, to join.…

A different thought (but along this same line) would be to have the study group (though sponsored by evangelicals) run itself: each member could conduct a session on his particular interpretation of some passage in the Bible and then lead a discussion among various members of the group following his talk.

Both ideas would help unite believers, might encourage non-believers to attend (and participate if they desired), and might break down denominational skepticism and confusion.

NANCY P. HARREL

Deland, Fla.

Those who accept the Bible’s testimony to itself … should have a fellowship. They already have it in Christ; it is desirable that they have it before men.…

The proposed evangelical Christian institution of higher learning would be a good starting point.

A. J. STIREWALT

Lutheran missionary

Kobe, Japan

We should ask for opinions as to what could be done within the framework of the NAE, what changes should be made to make it acceptable. Or should we drop the NAE and seek a new organization or fellowship?

ARNOLD T. OLSON

President

Evangelical Free Church of America

Minneapolis, Minn.

Should We Separate?

The article by Klaas Runia (“When Is Separation a Christian Duty?”, June 23 and July 7) has been a great pleasure to read and study.… A poll of ministers of five major Protestant churches shows a very large per cent reject the vital teachings of God’s Word. What can an individual do when [his] supposed shepherd is pulling his flock backwards? Aaron almost took his people back into idolatry, just as many pastors of today are doing.

I am of the opinion that separation is better in such a case, as long as there are fundamental, Bible-guided churches to attend.

L. E. MORRIS

Norfolk, Neb.

Dr. Runia seems to refer profusely and exclusively to the letters of St. Paul but carefully skips the main text, the word of Jesus himself: “Behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves” (Luke 10:3), thus losing at least one dimension of his subject and probably the key to the problem.

BRUCE BOKHOUT

Don Mills, Ont.

Dr. Runia is entitled to his opinion, “I have no appreciation whatever for any form of separatism.” As a spiritual descendant of some very famous Separatists (they landed in Plymouth in 1620), I find myself wishing he’d rethink that opinion.

LESLIE G. DEINSTADT

Mayflower Congregational

Milwaukee, Wis.

A splendid illustration of divine action in separation is seen in Exodus 13:16. Moses is deep in intercession for Israel. Jehovah has found them a stiffnecked people and refuses to go up with them into the promised land. Moses pleads for a reversal of this decision: “Wherein shall it be known here that I and thy people have found grace in thy sight? Is it not in that thou goest with us?” The presence of God among his people, Moses reasons, is the proof positive of grace received. Moses concludes (in the AV), “So shall we be separated, I and thy people, from all the people that are upon the face of the earth.” The LXX reads not “so shall we be separated” but “both I shall be glorified and also thy people, more than all the nations.”

Here is separation by glorification, honor which distinguishes man and people from all others. It is not the cleavage which is emphasized but the glory which separates. And that glory is the direct result of the Lord’s presence—God among them, exalting them, honoring them, makes apparent their “separation” from the world. Of this kind of separation we can take more.

ELDON W. KOCH

Grace Baptist

Washington, D. C.

In The Wake Of War

Your account of the death of Solomon Matar, custodian of the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem (“Mideast: Weighing the Effects,” News, July 7) struck home with a brutal jab of sorrow to the heart of one traveler to the Holy Land. Anyone who ever visited the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection will remember how this humble Arab Christian made the occasion vivid and enriching by his eloquent Christian testimony to the truth of the Resurrection.

EDWARD A. JOHNSON

St. Peter’s Lutheran

Hay Springs, Neb.

The report, “Jerusalem: A Third Temple?” (News, July 21), showing that the Jews do not plan to rebuild the Temple and restore the sacrifices because they feel that Messiah will do it, confirms what I have believed for years from Ezekiel 43:10, 11, that they will not be shown the pattern until they are “ashamed of their iniquities.” This Third Temple will follow Israel’s repentance and the return of Jesus the Messiah.…

A fitting follow-up to that report would have been the words of Genesis 18:20, 21; “As for Ishmael … I will make him a great nation. But I will establish my covenant with Isaac.” This is the sovereignty of God, acknowledged by King Hussein, who told his people that “Allah did not will [an Arab victory],” and professed by Presbyterians, who acknowledge that “all things are ordained of God.”

WILLIAM G. LOWE

Berlin Bible Church

Narrowsburg, N. Y.

I have great difficulty reconciling the intellectual integrity and candid scholarship you customarily show with the “prophetic” tenor of recent articles on the significance of the Israeli affair. I was truly surprised to see what appears, to me at least, to be such parochial deductions concerning prophecy and current events.

I for one would like to see a qualified scholar of the amillennial school given an assignment to speak to the issue. I think the fare so far has been far too narrow.… For such a debatable point to be treated in such authoritative fashion is unfortunate, especially when more and more of us are looking to your magazine as spokesman for the evangelical position.

BEN CHANDLER

Church of God (Anderson)

Montesano, Wash.

I was quite pleased with the editorials on the Near East crisis in recent issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, but … you can imagine my chagrin and disillusionment when reading the “interpretive appraisal” written by the Rev. James L. Kelso (News, July 21).

ELIAS NEWMAN

Minneapolis, Minn.

Many of the statements he makes are contrary to the facts as I know them to be and as many others of us know them to be from personal, on-the-spot knowledge of the situation.… I have been in Nazareth, and I know the condition of the Arabs there and the good relationship that there is between the Arabs and the Jews in Nazareth.…

We happen to be living in a completely Jewish community and are attempting to build up a good rapport between our church and the Jews, and it grieves us to see someone like this be able to get his views into print in a reputable publication.… We feel that it is time for Christians to speak out on behalf of Israel and be identified as friends of Israel.… This does not mean that we condone or approve of everything they do … [but] as Christians we certainly ought to be praying for them and encouraging them and trusting that this may give us further opportunities to witness to them concerning their need of Jesus Christ, as Lord and Saviour.

HAROLD P. WARREN

First Baptist

Oak Park, Mich.

Faith On Campus

In reading your fine editorial, “New Thoughts on Campus Ministries” (July 7), I was struck by the sentence, “Unexamined presuppositions—perhaps the most overlooked fact is that all starting points for reasoning are based on faith.” If you could get a C. S. Lewis-type of “translator” for Cornelius Van Til’s excellent point along this line (in The Defense of Faith) and print a feature article on it, you would be shining an intellectual torch in a philosophically murky world.

MRS. TOM DODSON

Fairfax, Va.

It is suggested that “pre-evangelism” will become increasingly more important. If I’m reading this right, I would say that the public school would be in an excellent position to impart the academic knowledge of Christian teaching (pre-evangelism) upon which an evangelistic thrust could later be built. The public schools’ responsibility toward religion is to make certain that their students entrusted to their care have an understanding of whatever is necessary to carry on a successful life. Understanding religion in its broadest context, and for our country in particular this would include an emphasis on Christianity, is a legitimate part of the work of the public school. In the prayer and Bible-reading case, the U. S. Supreme Court specifically said that one’s education was not complete without a study of religion. We’re long overdue for such serious study.

I was interested in the comment that the loss of faith common among college students took place back in elementary and secondary schools. This can only reemphasize my point that religion should be studied significantly and properly at these lower levels. I’m not so sure that young people have rejected Christianity—they just really haven’t heard it. I believe that if young people were aware of the degree and depth that Christian principles have influenced Western civilization, those students would be much more interested in giving Christianity a sympathetic hearing.

JAMES V. PANOCH

Executive Secretary

Religious Instruction Association, Inc.

Fort Wayne, Ind.

To Straighten The Record

In a recent issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY a brief announcement was made to the effect that I had resigned from Charlotte Chapel, Edinburgh, owing to ill health. In order to put the record straight, I would be most grateful if you would make it clear that I am now pastor emeritus of Charlotte Chapel, and am consequently free from all administrative responsibilities in order to undertake a world-wide preaching ministry.

ALAN REDPATH

Edinburgh, Scotland

In recent issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, President L. Doward McBain of Phoenix, Arizona, head of our convention, is indicated to have said that he “wished the Harnish move had succeeded so that he could take it rather than apologies to the Southern Baptist Convention” (June 9, p. 35) and that “I think it is not only possible, but it is absolutely essential for evangelicals to cooperate” (June 23, p. 34).

My purpose is not to deny these statements, either in behalf of him or in behalf of myself. However, when they stand alone, they seem to overlook something that he also said in the press conference at the Southern Baptist Convention in Miami Beach in early June. After indicating his wish that it had been possible for American Baptists to participate with other Baptists in the Crusade of the Americas, he pointed out that we had a problem in accepting that invitation because we had a previous program commitment.… In other words, Dr. McBain was not taking a position contrary to that of the General Council.

R. DEAN GOODWIN

Executive Director

Division of Communication

American Baptist Convention

Valley Forge, Pa.

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A Presbyterian layman shares his concerns

The United Presbyterian Church, in which I was raised and my father before me and his father before him, is being taken away from me by The Establishment—the staffs of the various headquarters, boards, and agencies that make up the hierarchy of our church. I am being deprived of my Presbyterian birthright, my religious heritage, as originally written in statements of belief that were rooted in the Reformation and signed and sealed myriad times over by dedicated laymen and clergy who have continued their belief in the Bible. Now this heritage is being subverted by a new statement of belief—the “Confession of 1967.”

We of the Presbyterian faith still believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice, the revelation of salvation through the grace of God and of the spiritual rebirth of the individual. But The Establishment by and large does not fully believe this and has made its unbelief our church’s official position.

We still believe the Bible when it says that Jesus Christ, as one member of the Godhead, came to earth as the divine Son of God through the Virgin Mary. But The Establishment apparently does not subscribe to this belief.

We still believe the Bible when it reveals that Christ’s kingdom on earth is not material but spiritual, and that the true mission of the Church is to preach the good news of the Resurrection to the end that each person will be reborn and thus will love and serve his neighbor. But the “Confession of 1967” does not follow this divine plan. Christ’s plan is to change people through the power of the Holy Spirit. The new plan is to change things through the intellect and power of the church hierarchy.

Lack of total belief in the Bible as the inspired and infallible word of God has been present among the clergy for years, but only as whisperings of a comparatively small minority. Now we find that the undercover whisperings have come into full voice as the official creed of the church.

The voice of the new confession, however, speaks in words that almost obscure the startling fact that faith in the Bible has been turned to doubt, that belief has been changed into unbelief, and that reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit has been changed into reliance on the fallible interpretations of men.

Most of us who now realize all this have been too slow in finding it out. I daresay that even now the great majority of Presbyterian laymen do not realize that the “Confession of 1967” has confused and negated much of our Reformed faith. It is a far cry from the clear, concise, contemporary statement that was desired by the two Presbyterian denominations when they merged in 1958.

Now let me anticipate those who will accuse me of criticizing anyone who does not believe as I do. Not for a minute would I deny anyone the right to have honest convictions that differ from the historic Presbyterian beliefs. It certainly is fair and honest enough to disagree with previously stated tenets. These basic beliefs that Presbyterians share with most of the other denominations have been attacked before and have withstood the assault.

But that is not to say that the question of honesty and morality is not involved. It is. How can anyone tack the Presbyterian name on an official statement that cannot honestly be associated with that name as it has existed over the years? This is a tragic betrayal of all the members, visible and invisible, whose faith and works have created that name. I salute the Unitarians and others who, when they had basic differences with their former affiliations, were honest enough to leave and institute a different church under a different name rather than take over the existing church and radically change its statement of faith.

My opposition to the new confession has made me unpopular with most of the clergymen I know. This is understandable, since clergymen constitute the backbone of The Establishment. One of them who heard me express my convictions invited me to leave the church if I was not willing to go along with the decisions made by the “duly elected representatives” who compose our ruling bodies.

But are they “duly elected representatives”? Let’s see how representative they are.

We Presbyterians have been rather boastful about how our representative form of church government parallels that of the Republic of the United States, and how the two constitutions were created at the same time in the same city with many delegates serving in both conventions. We have been proud to say that we do things in “a truly representative way.”

That statement is substantially true at the individual church level. The church members elect a group of lay “elders,” with the minister as moderator, that governs the church. This body is usually representative, at least in the long run, and its structure accords with one of the basic Protestant tenets, that of the “priesthood of all believers.” This phrase means, in plain words, that the church members and clergy alike are responsible for the functioning of the church. If this method works as it should, the basic power emanates from the bottom of the church government structure.

Now let’s follow this matter of representation a step higher in the governing structure. A considerable number of individual churches in an area are grouped together in a “presbytery” to which each church sends commissioners. This arrangement appears representative in the true American tradition. But the actuality contradicts the appearance, since it reverses the principle found in the churches. In the churches, the power is in the hands of the laity; but in the presbytery, the power is in the hands of the clergy despite the original democratic concept of our church government.

This distortion of the representative principle in the presbytery comes about in three ways:

1. The minister or ministers of each church are commissioners ex officio, and for every clergy commissioner there is one lay commissioner (an “elder”). The lay commissioner should consider the views of all church members in voting his conscience, and most would. But his vote is matched by that of the minister, who is not actually a member of the local church but a member of the presbytery. As such the minister may not feel any responsibility at all for representing the local church. This proportion of one layman to one minister can hardly be considered true representation.

2. A number of clergymen serving in official staff positions or other non-parish assignments also are voting members of the presbytery. But since they are not ministers of local churches there are no lay commissioners to match them. This means there are substantially more voting clergy than lay commissioners in most presbyteries, especially in those where headquarters staffs are located. (True, an overture to any presbytery can request “elders at large”; but this procedure is little known and seldom used.)

3. The manner of operating the presbyteries works against obtaining lay representation that is adequate both in quality and in quantity:

a. In most presbyteries, the meetings are held during the daytime on weekdays. This suits the convenience of the clergy but discourages the attendance of the most able lay prospects, who are occupied in their trades, professions, and businesses and are unable to get away during the week, but could attend on a weekend.

b. Unlike a congressional or state legislative representative, the lay commissioner to presbytery generally is not a regular and therefore does not “know the ropes,” is not well acquainted with the other commissioners, does not know what has been going on, and usually has had little opportunity to learn about the issues to be discussed and voted on.

c. Because of these situations, the attendance of lay commissioners suffers by default. The majority of the clergy over the laity then becomes even larger. And many lay commissioners who do come are not well informed, lack a basis for independent judgment, and too often blindly follow the lead of their ministers.

Thus the predominance of the clergy means that the presbyteries cannot possibly be truly representative. And therefore, the General Assembly itself cannot be truly representative, since the selection of commissioners to the assembly is made under presbytery influence.

Take for example the original committee appointed by the General Assembly to write the “Confession of 1967.” On this rather large committee there were only two lay persons, and one was a paid member of the church headquarters staff.

In view of all of this, how can anyone say that our church, financed almost entirely by laymen, is the truly representative church it was intended to be?

For me, one of the unhappiest aspects of this whole business is the necessity of expressing criticism of the church organization. My father was a Presbyterian clergyman, and my whole upbringing puts me in sympathy with the parish minister. As a preacher’s son and a longtime elder, I can appreciate the frustration the minister must often feel as he sees the lack of spiritual rebirth in so many parishioners and the consequent lack of Christian living and loving in material matters.

How human it is, then, for him to be tempted to abandon the indirect method of working for betterment of material conditions through individual redemption and to seek to get results through direct action—even though the authority for and correctness of that action may be dubious. The fact that the method he has abandoned is Christ’s method (as explained in the Bible) may bother him. Certainly he must be aware that the Bible expresses disapproval of his humanistic approach. He may even rationalize his position by trying to diminish the authority of the Bible and the omniscience of Christ. This attempted diminishment can be seen in the “Confession of 1967.”

A vast number of our clergy, however, do not accept the humanistic concept, and they have had the courage to say so. Many others are likeminded but have not dared to speak out for fear that their future progress in the church might suffer.

And what do the lay members of the church think of all this? No one knows. They are not allowed to vote on matters of this kind. Even straw votes would not show an informed opinion, simply because the membership has not been well informed on the pros and cons of the various issues. In fact, a huge number of them do not know what the real issues are. How could they? The national church magazine is dependent on church headquarters for its material and its direction. In the individual church, the pulpit and usually the church news sheet are controlled by the minister. What other means of informing the people are there? The mailing lists of church members too often are not available to organizations like the Presbyterian Lay Committee that seek to keep lay members informed.

In the recent controversy over the new confession, the case for resisting the proposed confessional change was not adequately presented because there was no effective way for informed laymen to voice their dissent.

It has been pointed out that the Westminster Confession, which expresses the historic Presbyterian beliefs, is not being discarded but will be included in the omnibus “Book of Confessions,” and that this will be the official Presbyterian document. Then what am I concerned about? Just this: Because the “Confession of 1967” is the latest statement of church belief, it will naturally take precedence over the Westminster Confession.

The theory that both can be valid in the Presbyterian faith is untenable for the simple reason that they are not supplementary, as sometimes claimed, but in many basic aspects are contradictory. In fact, the chairman of the committee that wrote the confession said one reason for writing it was to make honest men out of hundreds of Presbyterian clergymen who vowed at their ordination that they believed the Westminster Confession even though they did not wholly believe it.

In other words, we could well say that the Presbyterian Church has been infiltrated by men who perjured themselves in order to gain entrance as clergymen and who, joined by others who have renounced their vows, are now in the forefront of those who wish to change the contents of the package without changing the wrapper.

Truth Or Treason?

Do you imagine that the Gospel is a nose of wax, which can be shaped to suit the face of each succeeding age? Is the revelation once given by the Spirit of God to be interpreted according to the fashion of the period?

My very soul boils within me when I think of the impudent arrogance of certain willful spirits from whom all reverence for revelation has departed. They would teach Jehovah wisdom: they criticize his Word and amend his truth. Certain scriptural doctrines are discarded as dogmas of the medieval period; others are denounced as gloomy because they cannot be called untrue. Paul is questioned and quibbled out of court, and the Lord Jesus is first lauded and then explained away. We are told that the teaching of God’s ministers must be conformed to the spirit of the age. We shall have nothing to do with such treason to truth. Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened? Shall his ministers speak as if he were? Verily, that same treasure of truth which the Lord has committed unto us we will keep inviolate so long as we live, God helping us.—C. H. SPURGEON.

When we peel the wrapper from the package, what do we find?

• A church that advocates concessions to alien ideologies “even at risk to national security.”

• A church that condones the assertion that a civil law should be broken if the lawbreaker thinks it is unfair or unjust.

• A church that seems intent on repeating the tragedy of the Middle Ages and expanding its power materially instead of deepening its power spiritually.

• A church that is diverting an increasing amount of its time and attention from developing character to developing official, corporate pronouncements on the fair level of wages, the proper course of action in Viet Nam, the recognition of one union over another in a jurisdictional dispute, the merits of a local bond issue, the admission of Red China to the United Nations, the seating of Adam Clayton Powell, and many other complex economic and political matters over which even the most sincere Christians and our justices of the Supreme Court will differ.

• A church that equates social action with the primary mission of the Church instead of teaching the power of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God as the primary way of changing the lives of individuals—and a church that, as a result, is developing social workers instead of ministers who proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Major Shift

Historically, religious activity in the United States has been financed almost entirely through voluntary contributions. Church-state separation was a great American experiment. Churches thrived under the discipline of having to pay their own way by passing the offering plate at Sunday services. Government aid was considered a violation of the First Amendment, which prohibits laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

But within the last few years Congress has enacted far-reaching new legislation which invites religious institutions to share in major appropriations. These new laws have obliterated important segments of the traditional money line separating church and state. As a result, churches now readily pass the plate to Washington.

Some churchmen hail this developing church-state “partnership” as a creative new way to serve society. Others regard it a retrogression to the old European pattern whereby churches became stagnant under state subsidy, bickering endlessly with political authorities and preoccupying themselves with concerns for which the larger allocations were provided.

Thwarting Integration

The present trend already is reported to be having at least one serious effect. Dr. W. Stanley Rycroft, noted Presbyterian churchman, told a meeting of Americans United for Separation of Church and State earlier this year that federal aid to church-related schools is being used to thwart racially integrated education. “In large cities,” he said, “there has been an exodus from public schools in an attempt by parents to flee integration.”

Public money makes its way to churches today largely via the education, welfare, and research routes. A Senate subcommittee recently disclosed that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare operates on a full-time basis thirty-five major programs in education, extending from pre-school to the graduate level, which incorporate church schools into the federal education scheme.

“Obligations of HEW for the fiscal year 1965 to educational institutions other than administrative agencies included 2,935 to public institutions and 3,268 to private institutions,” the subcommittee reported. “Of these, 1,979 were church affiliated.”

A recent tally showed Yeshiva University (Jewish) getting the most federal support of all religious institutions, $19,950,000 in 1965 alone. Duke University (Methodist) topped Protestant colleges with $18,422,000, Loyola of Chicago headed the Catholic list with $13,385,000.

In testimony given the subcommittee last year, thirty-seven divinity schools were listed as using federal grants and loans. A young Roman Catholic priest is getting a $12,150 salary from the U. S. Office of Education for a precedent-setting public-parochial school complex whose development he is overseeing in Swanton, Vermont. Forty Unitarian-Universalist ministers are receiving free gerontologic training at Pennsylvania State University under a $24,913 federal grant.

The government’s war on poverty is also involved very closely with the churches. An estimated $90,000,000 is meted out annually through the churches by the Office of Economic Opportunity. Half of a Chicago Head Start program was recently described as being sponsored by church-related organizations. Much more could probably be channeled through churches if anti-poverty officials did not on their own clamp an arbitrary 10 per cent ceiling upon religiously related expenditures.

Theoretically, government funds are not to be used for religious instruction, proselyting, or ritual. Church-related institutions are forbidden from making membership or belief a condition for receiving aid. But there is plenty of latitude and many a loophole in the guidelines, and precious little policing. At one Methodist church, the ladies’ auxiliary took on a Head Start program as its “missionary project” for the year with the result that “several families of the children are now members of the church.”

Some current government projects are questionable not only because they involve a religious institution as a financial channel but also because there is uncertainty whether they really serve the public interest. A $25,000 grant went to Seattle Pacific College, operated by the Free Methodist Church, for one of its zoology teachers to research “the relationships of the development of intestinal parasites to the frog’s change from a tadpole to an adult.” Another grant went to Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center for a “psychological and linguistic study” of glossolalia.

To be sure, much government-financed research is commendable. At Baylor University, owned and run by Southern Baptists, more than $1,000,000 in public funds was expended in the development of an artificial heart. Much of the federal money taken by Baylor—$9,770,000 during 1965—was earmarked for research.

Local and state governments also participate in wholesale giveaways to churches and related institutions. In New York, half the welfare money is said to be distributed through church-related philanthropic groups. But at this level, the boon is more often in the form of surplus government property deeded to churches at prices far below actual market value. Urban redevelopment projects, moreover, have helped many churches to relocate and rebuild at considerable financial gain.

The speed with which some churches have responded to government offers is especially impressive. There has been a reported 75 per cent church sponsorship of the low-income supplementary rental housing. And in the first four years of the FHA mortgage-insurance program for senior citizens’ housing, religious groups were the largest category of non-profit sponsors.

At that, churches apparently don’t move fast enough to suit the government. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey chided churchmen attending the National Council of Churches assembly in Miami Beach last December for not being sufficiently aggressive in taking up the government offer of long-term low interest loans under the 221D3 provision of the Housing Act. He said he had worked hard for that clause.

Actually, federal benefit programs have mushroomed so quickly that apparently they haven’t been reconciled with existing policies. A college student can get a vast assortment of government grants and loans to finance his education. But if he earns the money, he can’t even claim tuition expenditures as an income-tax deduction.

So far, the American people have accepted the principle of government as a big new benefactor of the churches with no great qualms. Involvement has become so great that any substantial backtracking is unlikely, especially since inflation has put serious crimps in many religious institutional budgets. Yet some people are asking, “How have the churches become so enmeshed in government programs, considering that there has been no significant public debate over the propriety of the change in policy?” Such people point to a 1966 Gallup survey indicating a growing measure of public opinion against government aid to religion.

The drift can be traced back to the days following World War II, when thousands of clergymen were trained at government expense because they had served in the military. In a similar vein, the Hill-Burton Act of 1946 granted federal funds for hospitals, and church-related hospitals were made eligible with the rest. The Housing Act of 1950 and other pieces of social legislation perpetuated the trend. America’s youngsters, in parochial as well as public schools, were introduced to publicly-paid-for milk, lunch, and bus transportation.

The Soviet launching of Sputnik indirectly spawned the next big step, for it led to enactment of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. CHRISTIANITY TODAY, in one of the few times it has ever criticized specific legislation, then charged that the NDEA “virtually provides a new formula that gives advocates of tax funds for parochial schools what they want.”

All these programs, however, were but preliminaries to the main events, which took place between 1963 and 1965. President Kennedy, as the first Roman Catholic in the White House, took a hard line against federal aid to parochial schools on the elementary and secondary level. Nonetheless, he advocated more money from Washington for colleges, church-related and others. Thus the Higher Education Facilities Act was passed to aid campus construction. The 1967 fiscal year appropriation was $722,744,000. Georgetown University, a leading Jesuit school, is getting one of the biggest grants, a whopping $2,338,530, to erect a law center in the nation’s capital.

In 1964 came the declaration of the war on poverty with passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, the administration of which freely utilizes churches and specially created religious agencies as conduits and buffer entities for disbursem*nt of aid (the environment is supposed to be “religiously sterile,” but OEO officials “don’t feel that we can justifiably insist that they take the cross off the point of the building or remove a ten-ton statue”). In the enthusiasm for alleviation of suffering, the adverse implications of the bill upon the church-state separation principle were ignored. The bigger noise that year was over the issue of Bible reading and prayer in public schools. The Republican platform favored restoration of classroom devotions. Neither political party took a stand on the money line separating church and state.

New Precedents

With the election of a number of additional Democrats to Congress, President Johnson won new power to enact legislation. Among the precedent-setting new bills were the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, both of which opened wide new doors into the U. S. Treasury for church-related institutions.

Implementation of the ESEA has been especially thorny, though the church-state issue therein had purportedly been resolved on the basis of an old, resurrected “child-benefit theory.” Methodist Bishop Richard C. Raines of Indianapolis calls the child-benefit claim “but a subterfuge which excuses us for doing indirectly what law forbids us to do directly. A leaky roof of a parochial school can be fixed at public expense, free textbooks provided, teachers hired, buildings built, and pupils bussed to school—all under the child-benefit umbrella.” ESEA’s appropriation for fiscal year 1967 alone amounted to $1,342,410,000. The taxpayer can only guess how much of this figure is being used in parochial schools.

All the new intrusions on the church-state separation principle came about, not by specific government design or as the result of some secret conspiracy, but as a byproduct of mushrooming social legislation. Historians will doubtless record, however, the growing Roman Catholic Church as a predominant force behind the big change. The church has consistently lobbied for tax money at all levels. Its hierarchy has never really accepted the church-state separation principle. For a long time, Protestant leaders stood up to Roman Catholic demands for public money. More recently, however, their resistance has dwindled in the spirit of ecumenicity. With all the government money American Catholic institutions now get, they still refuse to follow the lead of their Protestant brethren in making public their financial statements.

Protestant churchmen have contributed to the shift not only through silence but by promotion of the concept of the secularization of the church. “If they have their way,” says Time, “it may be hard in the future to tell where the church begins and the world leaves off.” This raises the basic problem of enforcement of church-state separation. How can church-state separation be insured when the secular cannot be distinguished from the sectarian?

The churches’ preoccupation with social issues today adds to the problem. It also poses a trap. The more the churches accept tax money, the more they yield independence and integrity and drift toward where the money is. Inasmuch as public policy determines the disposition of public money, churches could eventually find themselves instruments of public policy rather than influencers.

Few churchmen are sensitive to the dangers. They scream at the implications of accepting CIA funds but apparently see no problem in taking money from the Defense Department or the National Science Foundation or HEW. They appear indifferent to the repeated accusations from abroad that American churchmen are agents of official Washington.

One liberal churchman who has dared to buck the tide is the Rev. Dean M. Kelley, director of the National Council of Churches’ Department of Religious Liberty. He contends that the church has “its own unique and indispensable service to perform for society, as important as that of government.” He warns against churchmen who are beginning to act like “brokers of civil power.”

It must be said, with all due respect, that there are many well-meaning, devout citizens who see the erosion of spiritual values as much more serious than the separation principle. They interpret the First Amendment as prohibiting only the establishment of a single church, not the financial support of all churches. Edwin Palmer, a Protestant leader of the predominantly Catholic lobby known as Citizens for Educational Freedom, worries particularly about an adverse religious effect from the withholding of public funds from parochial schools. People like Palmer feel this coerces Christian parents into giving their children a debilitating, secularistic upbringing in the public schools. They also point to the fact that parochial schools save taxpayers about $2.1 billion annually.

A Better Hope

On the other hand, CEF fails to see the incipient wrong in bringing the churches under the mercy of public policy, of letting politics call the shots rather than spiritual priorities or even human need, and of letting the government pay the bill for welfare for which churches get credit. CEF might well better channel its resources into campaigns for voluntary contributions—fund-raising counsel say there is more contribution money available today than ever before.

Aside from a great popular outcry against public aid for sectarian activity, the one hope left for the separation principle lies with the courts. The U. S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the constitutionality of government support of religious schools. If it were to outlaw such support, the effect could be far-reaching.

Many court cases are pending, but so far they have been hung up on a legal technicality. Taxpayers have no standing to sue and thereby test the constitutionality of legislation, unless they can establish specific damage. U. S. Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina, is trying to overcome the obstacle with a special bill. It would pave the way for judicial review of most major legislation under which churches are tapping the federal treasury.

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The New Catholic Encyclopedia calls the Sunday-school movement “probably the most far-reaching educational activity in the field of religion since the Reformation.” The Sunday school for factory workers that Robert Raikes established almost 200 years ago in Gloucester, England, soon reproduced itself around the world. Just eleven years later, in 1791, the Philadelphia Sunday School Union began establishing new Sunday schools. Almost everywhere the expansion of the Sunday school was phenomenal; within a century there were more than 100,000. By 1906, in the United States alone, 13 million pupils were enrolled, and by 1960, 37 million.

In recognition of the 150th anniversary of the American Sunday-School Union, which sponsors more than 1,600 Sunday schools in thirty-nine states, a panel of Christian leaders recently faced the movement’s present-day difficulties and pointed toward some solutions. Members of the panel were The Honorable John B. Anderson, United States congressman from Illinois, a distinguished layman whose home church in Rockford (First Evangelical Free) sponsored rural Sunday schools that later developed into two growing churches; Dr. Richard C. Halverson, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C., executive director of International Christian Leadership, and one of the speakers at the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin; the Rev. William E. Pannell, Negro evangelist and staff member of Youth for Christ, active in both Detroit and Chicago; and Charles Nagel, vice-president of Provident National Bank in Philadelphia and a member of the Board of Managers of the American Sunday-School Union. Editor Carl F. H. Henry, of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, was moderator. The National Broadcasting Company recently carried an abridgment of the comments on its Sunday-morning network program, “Faith in Action.”—ED.

Henry: Are there not many signs that for all its grand history, the Sunday school is now in trouble? In the past ten years book after book has appeared reassessing the educational program of the Christian churches, and many of these have been highly critical of the Sunday school. After 106 years of publication, the Sunday School Times has merged with another magazine. Isn’t the Sunday school in difficulty?

Halverson: A leading authority on church growth, Dr. Donald McGavran of California, has said that if just the children from its Sunday school were brought into church membership, one major denomination in America would enjoy a net gain of 700,000. When you compare this with that denomination’s actual net gain, which was 5,600 in one year, I think you begin to appreciate what the situation is. In Washington, D. C., the churches of one major denomination in one year averaged a decrease in attendance of 100 per Sunday school.

Pannell: I owe a great deal to the Sunday school. As a lad I was reached for Christ through the Sunday school, much through the kind of emphasis that we represent. Interested white friends in the neighborhood took me to Sunday school and introduced me to Jesus Christ, and here I am. I buy Sunday school—I believe in it! But any number of young people today, particularly in the teen years, think that Sunday school is kind of a Mickey Mouse.

Anderson: From the statistics given by Dr. Halverson, it seems clear to me that it would be very imprudent to ignore the danger signals surrounding the Sunday-school movement. On the other hand, I think I would answer the question, “Is the Sunday school a lost cause?,” with a ringing negative. It may well stand on the threshold of one of its more important and exciting and challenging eras of growth. Recently in a Law Day observance, the attorney general of the United States, Mr. Ramsey Clark, made the point that it is in youths between fifteen and sixteen that we have the largest group of law violators in the country today. He went on to say that it is absolutely imperative—indeed, I think he used the words “desperately necessary”—that we reach this group of young people. And if they’re going to be reached, the Sunday school is going to have to be one of those mechanisms, one of the instruments, with which we reach them.

Nagel: I think much depends on definition. What kind of Sunday schools do we have in mind? The question implies that there was a time when the Sunday school was not a lost cause, and that there has been a change. Has the method or has the approach changed in the Sunday schools now in trouble? Or have people changed, so that methods formerly effective are no longer effective?

Henry: Well, someone has said that if a few large publishing houses now discontinued Sunday school lessons based on the International Sunday School Lessons, the whole program of uniform lessons launched about a century ago would now collapse. Some predict that this whole International Sunday School Lesson cycle is already in its last seven-year span.

Nagel: That wouldn’t disturb me too much, Dr. Henry, so long as Sunday schools continue to be dedicated to the written Word of God and to the Living Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, in their method of reaching people. Regardless of lesson topics, I believe that the Sunday school will continue to be effective in the lives of these people.

Anderson: Even though I’ve expressed myself as believing that the Sunday school is far from a lost cause, I think we would be on dangerous ground indeed if we were to recommend against any change in the format of Sunday schools. The young people now growing up in this country (as the father of four children I think I have some knowledge of them) are a pretty sophisticated bunch. Because of the electronic communications media that we have today, because of a lot of other things, they are a lot more “savvy” than I was at the ages of nine, ten, twelve, and thirteen. We must very clearly realize the necessity, not of departing from the basic scriptural context of the Sunday school, but of using some new methods to bring Scripture to these young people.

Halverson: I think that any church administrator, or pastor, or Sunday-school superintendent, or director of Christian education, or Christian-education committee, that will really look at the Sunday school critically in terms of the challenge of the day will feel that there is tremendous opportunity—perhaps as much as ever. But our danger lies in the attitude that “we’ve always done it this way.” We get in a rut. I see absolutely no sense in the average “opening exercises” in the Sunday school today. They duplicate the worship service that takes place in the church, and nine times out of ten the Sunday-school superintendent or the department superintendent extends it twice as long as it’s supposed to go and the teacher doesn’t really have an opportunity to instruct. I wish we could abandon the opening exercises and get the children right into the classroom and into the Word, giving teachers an opportunity to relate to the students.

Anderson: We could pursue that point. Take an analogy from the federal government. Although we have been spending billions of dollars in this country for education at the state and local, and now the national, level, we discovered that only about 1 per cent of the money was going into educational research, into research on how to teach, on questions of methods and possible revisions of curricula. I think there is an important lesson here for the Sunday-school movement. As you say, just the fact we’ve always done things a particular way doesn’t mean that we should use the same methods to reach this very sophisticated age in which we live, even though our ultimate objective remains the same.

Pannell: I live in the inner city, whatever that means. I suppose it means I don’t live in the outer city. For us of color, it is extremely difficult to identify with the propaganda with which we are incessantly bombarded in the inner city, from whatever medium. It’s Caucasian, it’s middle-class, suburban. We have the same problem in our total educational system; some educators are beginning to grapple with it. And if the companies that provide this literature aren’t sharper—and that right soon—increasingly they’re going to find their printed matter irrelevant. You’ve got to find a way to find yourself. If you’re as conceited as I am, the first picture you look for in a piece of propaganda is your own. I don’t find myself visibly represented in this literature. Hence I have a tendency to “file” it. And if somebody “reaches me” at the right moment, I’m liable to fall for the rumor that whoever sells this stuff is selling it in the name of “the white man’s Christianity.”

Anderson: Mr. Pannell, criticism of the Sunday school has gone beyond religious periodicals; it’s in the popular press as well. One article I read made the point that the average teen-ager today would find it awfully difficult to find anything in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to enable him to meet the day-to-day problems of a teen-ager in 1967. Were you alluding to that or to something else in the comments you made?

Pannell: I wasn’t alluding to that. Although it’s not altogether improper, I don’t buy that. Jesus Christ is, as someone has suggested, history’s perpetual contemporary; there is no problem with that in my own mind. But in Chicago just the other day I talked to some young people coming from a high school, and I told the group that I was with Youth for Christ and that we work with teen-agers all around the world and all that stuff. One kid right behind me said, “Well, you can leave me out of that.” I said, “What’s the matter? You don’t understand, you don’t buy Jesus Christ?” He said, “Uh huh.” A kid over in the other corner of the car said, “Man, I do; I think he was a crazy cat.” Now, that was a bit shocking—I sense your reaction! But upon further questioning, the kid behind me admitted that his problem really wasn’t with Jesus Christ but with the fact that Jesus Christ gets lost in the machinery. Jesus Christ can get through if he’s presented properly, and he is contemporary. There’s no problem there. But we get the idea, you know, that Jesus Christ is Caucasian, that his headquarters are in Washington, that he was born in a log cabin on the hillsides of Georgia—and I’m not so sure you can substantiate that. He’s a total Christ for the total society.

Henry: For about twenty years the Sunday-school enrollment has been declining at the nine-to-eleven junior age level. But more recently, in some areas of the country there has been a noticeable decline in junior-high and senior-high groups, particularly since the Supreme Court ruling against prayers and Bible readings in the public schools. Now I’m not asking about the legality or illegality of the Supreme Court’s decision, but whether intentionally or unintentionally that ruling tended to downgrade the educational significance of the Christian religion in the eyes of the junior-high and senior-high students.

Halverson: I haven’t ever thought about that particular cause-and-effect relationship. I would be interested if somebody would test it. But my experience is that when Jesus Christ is presented as he really is in the New Testament, he appeals to youth—right across the board. One youth organization has as its slogan or theme, “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the Gospel.” And this doesn’t mean that they compromise the message in order to reach the kid. It means that they remove Christ from all the appendages that have been around him, that have caricatured him through the centuries, and let kids really see him. And the kids respond—not all, of course, but many find him very appealing.

Anderson: Dr. Halverson, what should be the educational philosophy of the Sunday school? Some people suggest that it ought to be a morning hour of social fellowship where we all get to know one another better. Back when I was attending Sunday school in the primary and secondary grades, it was pretty much the three R’s; you learned the books of the Bible, you learned various memory courses, and so on. But for the teen-ager in particular, should this be the approach today, or something else?

Halverson: It’s my observation that many evangelical Sunday schools don’t have what you might call a philosophy of Christian education. Now there are grand exceptions to this. But if you ask Sunday-school teachers, “What is your purpose?,” I think that they might respond by saying, “My purpose is to teach the Bible” or “My purpose is to win a soul to Christ,” or something like that. Some might even say, “My purpose is to get these children into the church.” I believe in the dissemination of a knowledge of the Bible, and I believe deeply in memorizing Scripture—as the Bible says—that we might not sin against God. But we must relate the purpose of Sunday school or Christian education to nurturing the child’s life in Christ through the Scriptures. It wasn’t accidental that Doctor Luke was led by the Spirit of God to record that Christ grew in wisdom (that’s intellectually) and in stature (that’s physically) and in favor with God (that’s spiritually) and man (that’s socially). In our Sunday schools we need to think of using the Scriptures to nurture the child in Christ so that he grows as a total person, rather than in just one area of his life.

Nagel: Well, I would like to comment on the effect of the Supreme Court decision on Sunday-school attendance, and on the importance of Scripture. When we consider the claims that the Bible makes for itself, when we consider what the Bible, the Word of God, has done in the lives of individuals, it stands to reason that if the reading of Scripture—even if not too carefully chosen—is discontinued in the public school, there will be an adverse effect. The Bible says of itself that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” That covers not only the individual’s responsibility to be reconciled to God, but also his responsibility to demonstrate what God has done in his life, through works visible to those about him. I believe that the Sunday school must present that kind of message. The teacher of the class must demonstrate in his own life the dynamic power of this Bible, this Gospel he’s presenting. Where that is done, I believe the results will be pleasing not only to the Lord but also to the teacher.

Anderson: There is only one point at which I might take issue, Mr. Nagel. How can you do this? The average Sunday-school teacher has about twenty-nine minutes, I guess, to present the lesson, and unless he is an unusual teacher that’s the total amount of time that he spends with this particular class or this particular youngster during the week. How can he implant the Scripture in their hearts by his example?

Nagel: Well, I believe there are two things that the teacher should try to accomplish just as quickly as possible. One is to make very plain each person’s need for a saving relation with the Lord Jesus Christ. The other is to get the student to recognize the Bible as the answer to his problems, as a Book which has great power in itself and to which he can look with confidence. Now, if the teacher can demonstrate that he himself has found this to be the source of answers, and if he has the kind of life and testimony he should have, he will inspire confidence in the pupil that will prompt him to look to this Bible for answers to the problems that certainly are the same for him as for his grandfather. They might appear under different names or different definitions, but the root problems are the same, and the answers are there if one will seek them prayerfully.

Halverson: Mr. Nagel, you began by referring to the dynamic quality of the Bible itself, and I thought you were going to say if this Bible is just presented, that’s it! And then you began to speak about the demonstration—, or I’d like to use the word “incarnation,”—of this Word, in the life of the teacher and his relation to the pupils. This is something tremendously significant. There flashes into my mind Paul’s statement to the Thessalonians: “Our Gospel came to you not in word only.” I believe that a tremendous danger on the part of Sunday-school teachers—and I’m speaking now of those who really believe in the Bible as the infallible Word of God—is their feeling that they can just “lay it out there.” They take passages like God’s promise that “my word shall not return unto me void.” But we have Paul’s warning against representation in word only and not in the Spirit. What’s important is not just teaching the children the Bible but relating incarnate truth to the children in whatever I’m teaching day by day.

Pannell: I object to the term “Sunday school.” I wouldn’t die over it, but “Sunday school” to me is really a juvenile term. I even object to the word “missionary.” I’m extra-sensitive at this point. You’ll grant me that, won’t you? My ancestors come from all over; it’s obvious that I’ve been “tampered with.” My ancestors come from those places to which historically we have sent missionaries, and most of my life—whether for good or bad—I’ve tried to live that reputation down. Now some character comes down to me on 47th Street and introduces himself as a Sunday-school missionary. This bothers me a little bit. And, getting back to Dr. Henry’s question about the Supreme Court decision, I’m not so sure that our young people were tuned in on that decision and half as excited about it as the theologians, but I do think that it tended to reinforce the idea that there is a basic incompatibility between Christianity and real sharp thinking.

Henry: Well, if this is so, isn’t it incumbent upon the Sunday school (let’s retain the term for a moment; it has a noble ancestry) somehow to set sights on the very problems that secular education tends to pose for young persons of junior-high and senior-high age, and to make the correlation of Christian education with these problems as exciting as secular education? In other words, isn’t the Sunday school then faced with the dire necessity of a head-on collision with the problems that public education raises for this young person who is now tempted to regard Christianity as irrelevant? Shouldn’t the Sunday-school teacher preserve for students the same sense of excitement that his public-school teachers do?

Halverson: May I first say a word about Mr. Pannell’s remarks. I understand his feeling. But I think there is a temptation today to abandon good words because they’re not understood, instead of giving them content. I personally fight for keeping good words and making them meaningful. I know some words are lost, unfortunately, but I wouldn’t say that about the words he mentioned. “Mission,” for example, is a very relevant word in business today, and in government today, and in the military today. “Mission” is a tremendous word, and we ought to give it meaning. We haven’t lost that word. And even “evangelism” has come into its own in the non-sacred world today. In our Sunday school, though we’ve been using what we think is an excellent curriculum for our senior high, we have just realized that when they move from senior high into college, they aren’t really equipped to meet what they’re going to face during their freshman year. We have not prepared them to encounter a critical approach to the Scriptures, and when they discover another view about the Scriptures, they are completely unprepared to resist it. And so we’re now revising our senior-high curriculum so that when students leave the program they will really be prepared to meet the issues they will face as college freshmen, in their first year away from home.

Henry: What other changes are needed? In Atlanta, Georgia, the First Alliance Church, which has two morning services and a marvelous Sunday-school plant, has a dozen teachers in public elementary or high schools or on college faculties who also are Sunday-school teachers. These volunteers illustrate the importance of emphasizing continuity between general education and Christian commitment.

Anderson: I think we would be much the poorer if we ever wholly supplanted the voluntary or volunteer aspect of the Sunday school with pure professionalism on the same level that we expect it in the public schools or in our colleges and universities. Nevertheless, we ought to be constantly aware of the need for up-grading the standards of those who teach in our Sunday schools.

Nagel: The effectiveness of the ministry of the American Sunday-School Union, which has been volunteer-centered through force of necessity, has not been impaired in the least by this. We know that the born-again Christian who is called by the Lord to take a class, who believes what he is asked to teach, and who evidences that belief in daily actions and in his concern for pupils under his responsibility, can be effective. Over 7,300 professions of faith in Christ were reported by our 150 missionaries. But we thank God also for those who have had professional training as teachers and who share this burden to reach boys and girls, and men and women, for Jesus Christ.

Henry: In what conspicuous ways might a Sunday-school teacher differ from a secular teacher? Do the public schools show a growing reliance upon mechanical methods of teaching that tend to widen the gap between teacher and student, while Sunday schools preserve the possibility of a closer teacher-student relationship?

Halverson: Well, you’ve pushed a button with me. I think this is fundamental to an effective Sunday school, that the teacher relate to persons, and I consider this relationship with persons fundamental to effectiveness as a teacher. When Mark records that Jesus chose twelve to be with him, it seems to me that this little preposition with underscores the techniques of Jesus’ way with men. He was with them. So often in a Sunday-school classroom, I think, the children are little its, little objects, instead of persons with whom the teacher must relate. Relating means involving oneself with those children in the totality of their lives all through the week, instead of just unloading a lesson on them in that Sunday-school classroom and then letting them go.

Anderson: Don’t we have to recognize, though, that the work of the Sunday school must be pretty closely coordinated with that of the other departments and arms of the church? It would be fine to follow the students all through the week, but presumably in many churches either a chapter of the Boy Scouts or the Christian Service Brigade or various other types of youth organizations will take over for social occasions and other things young people like to do.

Nagel: I’d like to add a word about the difference between the secular school and the Sunday school, that makes possible an effective ministry with untrained or unprofessionally trained teachers. We get back again to the textbook, to the Word of God itself, to the dynamite or “power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” We read in Acts 4:13, “Now when they [that is, the high priests, rulers, elders, and scribes] saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.” And when our teachers in Sunday schools have been with Jesus, and know him and love his Word, and love those for whom Christ died, then that love and concern and the power of the Holy Spirit will be manifested to the pupil and will be effective in his life.

Pannell: I would think, too, that the edge a Sunday-school teacher will have is crucial at this point. In so many areas the school and all that it is, and the faculty and all that it represents, are part of “the Establishment.” It’s the “enemy.” You go because you have to. If you belong to one of those inner-city traps, you’ve got to believe that it’s “nothing but bad news” in so many areas. The guy can’t possibly wait until the bell rings; neither can most of the teachers, I would assume. For instance, in Detroit last year some very sharp, sophisticated young Negro leaders closed down one of our major high schools and forced the resignation of the principal in a top-level confrontation with the entire school board. Now, they did this because there was an increasing awareness on the part of the sharper students in that school that they were getting at best a second-class kind of education. I assume that every one of those kids could also put his finger on second-class teachers. As Congressman Anderson has pointed out, they are sharp and sophisticated. Somehow or other, then, we have got to wrap this Word in far sharper, far more sophisticated flesh than we have ever known. It has to be intellectually acute. It also has to be emphatically tuned, so that, whatever else comes through, the kid says, “Man, I don’t always understand what the cat’s saying, but I dig that cat. I don’t know what there is about him; I don’t know what makes him tick! I don’t know what that book under his arm is, but I buy that guy.” In other words, we’ve got to demonstrate that what we’re teaching in the name of Scripture and Jesus Christ is not irrelevant to the kid’s total standard of excellence, that is not in any way minimized and does not jar or clash. What we’re talking about has relevance to the total person. To present the Gospel and the Scriptures is to enhance and to ennoble, in the total sense of that word. I think we’ve got to get that through. I am tremendously disturbed by the attitude of some groups, paricularly when they invade our particular end of the turf. They seem always to be headed down toward the lower class, to the kid down here who presumably “really needs Jesus,” the implication being that the sharper guys don’t.

Henry: There are other problems I’m sure we wish we had an opportunity to discuss. There are 90 million adults in the United States not registered in any type of Bible study—a larger unreached population than all other age groups combined. It’s a real question whether any Sunday school can carry on a fully vital program without adult participation. Then we may question whether Sunday schools are really preparing for the time—it may be only a decade away—when people with a four-day work week will be thinking in terms of a Friday-Saturday-Sunday holiday out of town. And is the Sunday school really thinking of itself as an operational base for a total education program that reaches round the week?

Halverson: I think of a Sunday-school teacher who has had a class of senior-high boys in a certain Sunday school over a period of years. Every fall they move into that class twenty-five or thirty strong; they dwindle down to two or three by spring. And somehow this teacher is insensitive to this. He is oblivious to the fact that he is losing twenty-five or thirty high school kids every year. They were there when he started teaching the class, and within a few weeks they lost their interest in Sunday school and didn’t come any more. I don’t know what happens in his mind, except that perhaps he blames the kids, instead of asking how the teacher is relating to them, handling the Scriptures, incarnating the Scriptures.

Anderson: When we started I said I felt that although the Sunday school faces many problems, it might well be on the threshold of a really challenging and exciting era. I would add just this. One of the groups in this country today that is attracting young people is called the New Left. Recently one of my constituents sent me a piece of literature from one of these groups. I was impressed that, in outlining their program, they promised three things to their youthful adherents. One was the maintaining of a vision. The second was a program relevant to the problems of young people. And third was a sense of the urgency of these problems. It seems to me that is a pretty good summary for the Sunday school as it faces the future.

Halverson: I don’t think you can exaggerate the importance of a pastor’s relation to the Sunday school. I think that far too many pastors abdicate this responsibility. They leave it with the Sunday-school superintendent or a director of Christian education. Assuming an involved pastor, dedicated teachers, the centrality of the Scriptures, I don’t think the Sunday school is through, if we honestly and constantly and critically evaluate what we’re doing in the Sunday school in order to be relevant, in order to upgrade what we’re doing constantly. I believe that there is a tremendous opportunity in the future, a sense in which the Sunday school has never had a greater opportunity to meet the need of the age.

Pannell: I’m hooked on the city. I’ve just rediscovered the city. My preference would be the green pastures and a lovely house with green shutters and all that. But God has laid on my heart the city, where so many things converge. I’m particularly concerned that we understand the urgency of that issue. The city is where evangelical Christianity may well face up to its Waterloo. The city is where democracy, perhaps the future of it in terms of its total application, may well be decided. We’re concerned about the integration of a man’s personality, and his total life. The city is where we must flesh out our words in a totally integrated thrust. Take the teen-ager. Statistics suggest that perhaps less than a fourth of the Negro teen-agers live with both their parents throughout their young teen lives. Now you just can’t say the Gospel is the total answer to that thing. Sooner or later, somewhere, we’ve got to make an impact upon this young fellow wherever it has to be made so that we communicate to him self-esteem, self-work, self-respect, total manhood. We can do this in the name of Jesus Christ, and it must be done, unless in the name of the Gospel we’re going simply to perpetuate a dismal social situation.

Nagel: The American Sunday-School Union in this anniversary year reaffirmed its commitment to three principles expressed by three verses of Scripture. The first is Second Timothy 4:2, “Preach the Word,” which is the power of God unto salvation. Second is Second Timothy 2:2, “And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” And third, First Thessalonians 5:17, “Pray without ceasing,” recognizing that teacher and pupil must be the objects of the work of the Holy Spirit if anything of real consequence is to be accomplished in the life of either.

Henry: The Sunday school may have problems, but it does not have the problems that the pulpit has today. It doesn’t have the problems that the seminaries have today. It is really the twentieth century and the human race whose cause is lost. The Sunday school offers hope and light, and its light needs to be turned up so Jesus Christ and the Bible are kept at the center of human need. I think that’s the main thrust of this panel. Much about our age is drab and dismal, but the Sunday school, for all its faults, remains one hopeful beacon in the darkness of these times.

Secular Man?

He had been away from college for several years and had now come to the university to work on a Ph.D. in one of the social sciences. His hometown pastor had written me a brief note suggesting I call on him.

We arranged to have lunch in the cafeteria of his university residence hall. He greeted me amicably, and we went through the lunch line. We sat at a small corner table and proceeded almost directly to the matter at hand.

He related his early experience with the church. Typical. His mother had taught Sunday school for years. He was baptized as a young adolescent and held local and regional youth leadership positions. His undergraduate years were spent in the custodial care of an evangelical college. Then five years in the business world. A gradual drift away from religion. Now, no concern for the church. For several years he had been rather hostile toward Christianity; now he was just neutral.

He was matter-of-fact in saying he had outgrown the need for religion. He stated with some feeling, “I could never go back to what I had. No satisfaction. No freedom.” He went on, “Perhaps some day, when I’m about forty, I might work out a religious frame of reference, but I doubt it will ever happen. Right now I’m too busy sucking all of life in. There’s just too much to experience, and I’m hungry for a full life.”

As we rose from the table, I noticed that he had tasted each food but had finished only the cake. As we walked back to his room, he told me he had concluded that there was no synthesis for life. He had discovered that all that matters is that we play effectively our chosen role and do whatever is at hand with professional competence.

Back in his room I mentioned that I had not detected in his words any hint of his purpose for undertaking graduate study. I asked whether his decision was based partly on a desire to do something for others or make the world a bit better. He hadn’t any such idea, he said. He readily acknowledged that his life was self-centered and said he didn’t believe persons who say they are trying to invest their lives for the sake of others or for the sake of God. “They are hypocrites. All that matters is that we do our job well.” And, “Man is his own measure of all things.”

“Religion,” he reaffirmed, “is no longer personally relevant. It simply has no bearing on my life, nor, for that matter, on the lives of most people I know.” Then, after a reflective pause: “To be honest, I would have to say that rather than having actually outgrown the claims of Christ, I believe I make a more or less deliberate effort to ignore them.”

An awkward silence.

I suggested that we try to keep in touch and stood up as though to leave.

We shook hands.

I noticed that his hand was wet with perspiration. He noticed it too and quickly withdrew his hand. His eyes opened wide and his jaw dropped a bit. With a tone of surprise he blurted, “My God, my hands are wet.”

Silence.

“Yes, I noticed.”—Dr. JAMES W. DIDIER,University Baptist Chaplain, Michigan State University.

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The time has come for Americans to focus on a new kind of conspiracy in our country—a movement called the New Left. In recent months the effects of the New Left have been seen in many places: in demonstrations against American policy in Viet Nam, in civil disobedience, in calls for young men to resist the draft, in campus turmoil, in attacks against law and order, in desecrations of the American flag.

What is the New Left?

Actually, the New Left as a movement is difficult to define. If you visit a New Left meeting, you will find some of the participants smartly dressed, others with dirty T-shirts and baggy trousers. A high percentage are Beatniks—wearing long hair and beards, unkempt clothes, and sandals. A few are Hippies, experimenting with drugs and enamored with esoteric rituals such as “love-ins,” “be-ins,” and “happenings.” If you listen to their conversation, you will hear a steady flow of obscene and foul language. Sexual promiscuity is not considered in bad taste.

Most of the participants are students. The New Left is predominantly a college-age movement found in the college and university community—but not exclusively. Besides undergraduates, the New Left contains a wide assortment of other participants: college faculty members (mostly young), graduate students, guitarists, writers, intellectuals of various types, ex-students still “hanging around” the campus, curiosity-seekers, Communists, Trotskyites.

“We have within our ranks,” comments the national vice-president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest and best known of New Left groups, “Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, three or four different kinds of anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.”

In this amalgam is found much nonsensical chatter but also serious conversation by some highly motivated and articulate young people seeking to understand vital problems facing our nation today, such as poverty, civil rights, world peace, automation, the student’s role on the university campus, human dignity in a rapidly developing urban and industrial economy. Here is the paradox of the New Left: Many of the New Leftists are mere intellectual tramps who seek the exotic and eccentric as emotional outlets; but some, in one way or another, are seriously searching—not only for answers to society’s problems but for values of human existence in a world of great uncertainty.

To equate the New Left with a political party or a tightly disciplined organization is to miss its true identity. It is not an organization. It does not have a constitution, bylaws, or an official membership.

Rather the New Left is a mood, a philosophy of life, a Weltanschauung, a way of looking at self, country, and the universe. And in this mood lies its tragedy—and its danger!

For the New Left’s mood—and philosophy of life—is not one of support for America and its traditions, of upholding moral and democratic values. Rather, it is one of defiance, hostility, and opposition to our free society. It seeks to destroy, not to build. Its whole approach is one of negativism—to criticize, belittle, denigrate the principles on which this nation was built. Cynicism, pessimism, and callousness are its mottoes. At its heart, the New Left is nihilistic and anarchistic.

Hence, to dismiss the New Left, as some do, as a collection of simpletons, eccentrics, and jocular fools is to commit a grave mistake. Its adherents should not, as so often happens, be judged strictly by their Beatnik dress and ways (repugnant as they may be to most Americans). New Leftism poses today challenging and provocative questions for the nation—questions that each thoughtful citizen should carefully analyze, study, and understand. Who are these young people? Why have they chosen to disparage the society and institutions that gave them birth? Why is their gospel one of nihilism? Why have they rejected the values of our Judaic-Christian civilization?

The imperative need for knowledge is shown by the rapid growth of the movement. Just a few months ago the SDS’s national vice-president enthusiastically reported that his group had some 30,000 adherents. “Starting from almost zero,” he said, “we have achieved that number in seven years; we have grown ten-fold in only two years.” More and more the New Left is reaching into the high-school age group. New Left Notes, organ of SDS, comments:

The 600 members of SDS who are in high schools are the most underrepresented group in our organization.… A high school organizer would be able to make high school members more than peripherally involved in the affairs of SDS. Moreover, he could begin to help build a more solid high school movement. This would not be difficult.

To analyze the New Left is to become suddenly aware of the nihilistic wasteland it presents.

Basic to the New Left’s mood is the idea that contemporary American society (contemptuously called the “Establishment”) is corrupt, evil, and malignant—and must be destroyed. To reform it, to change it for the better, is impossible. It must—along with its Judaic-Christian values—be liquidated. “Let’s face it. It is, to use the crudest psychological terminology, a sick, sick, sick society in which we live. It is, finally, a society which approaches collective insanity—a system of authority-dependency relationships which destroys life and health and strength and creates debility, dependency, and deathliness.”

For that reason, members of the New Left take great delight in desecrating the American flag, mocking American heroes, and disparaging American history. They contemptuously hiss and boo officials of our government and show scornful disdain for opinions with which they disagree (the New Left at heart is extremely totalitarian, intolerant, and opinionated in nature). They urge resistance to the draft (even on occasions try to interfere physically with the legitimate activities of armed-services personnel on college campuses present for the purpose of recruiting), burn or mutilate draft cards, endeavor to dictate to university administrative officials how these institutions should be run.

In this spirit of nihilism, the New Left manifests a nauseating air of self-righteousness, as if it alone knows how to solve the problems of twentieth-century society and alone can be trusted to carry out these solutions. There is almost a hysterical repudiation of the older generation (defined as any person over the age of thirty—though this age minimum is rapidly decreasing). The older generation (our “impotent, neurotic elders”) is characterized as having sold out to “imperialistic monopoly capitalism” (note the use of Marxist terminology), and having “betrayed” the youth. Hence, it is not to be trusted—and no wisdom and advice can be expected from it.

Therefore, the New Left has little appreciation of and respect for history (“we have little or no sense of history”) or for the accumulated heritage and wisdom of former years. By rejecting the past, they lack a clear view of the future and fail to understand the nature of man as a human being. They are anarchistic iconoclasts, breaking and destroying, whose eschatological vision has no practical or even idealistic idea of what the future should be. Their chief aim, despite their protestations to the contrary, is to destroy, annihilate, tear down.

Their heroes are Castro, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh, or whoever they ebulliently believe is a fighter (preferably the romantic guerrilla type) against a “status quo” capitalist nation.

Ideologically, the ideas of existentialism, especially as reflected in the writings of the French authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, have been influential. But a major influence has been Marxism. Karl Marx is frequently quoted in their writings. They talk much about the concept of “alienation,” which derives in large part from Marx. By “alienation,” they mean their separation from, and lack of allegiance to, the institutions of contemporary society. These institutions (such as our educational system, private industry, the government, the military services), they claim, are “choking,” “stifling,” and “stunting” young people, creating in them a “slave psychology.” As one New Leftist put it: “From the moment he enters school, the student is subjected to innumerable procedures designed to humiliate him and remind him that he is worthless and that adults are omnipotent.”

In part, the New Left’s Beatnik style, their use of obscene language, their inclination towards drugs, is an attempt to shock their elders, a way of ostentatiously declaring their “freedom” from what they call the “old,” the “decadent,” the “bourgeois.” All too frequently, the hallucinatory world of drugs not only leads to permanent physical addiction but also makes even more difficult any transition to the world of reality. For many young people the use of drugs is a retreat, a withdrawal into a psychedelic world where they can evade making the basic decisions of life. This problem of drugs should not be taken lightly by our society.

How should this “decadent” society be destroyed? New Leftists are not sure. Their talk is vague but violent. “The only overtly political power we have,” says one New Leftist, “is the power to disrupt. But even this limited power can be significant.… We need to develop techniques of creative disruption.” To “radicalize” the youth, to build a “radical or revolutionary consciousness,” to create a “sense of radical self-identity”—these are constant New Left phrases.

This mood of “creative disruption” in the past has been reflected in various tactics of protest, such as demonstrations, sit-ins, petition campaigns. But the mood of New Left protest, unfortunately, is now giving way to one of resistance. This is one of the tragedies of any movement of protest that refuses to find an outlet through legitimate channels of society and in cooperation with other groups—it moves to more radical, extreme, and bitter positions. Many New Left leaders, making judgments from increasing feelings of personal frustration and hatred, are talking in terms of resistance (a word frequently used by them) to the society they detest.

One SDS leader says:

We have to build a movement out of people’s guts, out of their so-far internalized rejection of American society, and present people with a revolutionary alternative to the American way of life.

Many of us in SDS share a conviction that this is what has to happen. That we must resist, and that people must break free. None of us is sure we can win. All we can say is that there are other ways to lead our lives in the face of the obscenity of what American life is—and that we intend to live them that way.

Still another New Leftist talks about the movement’s future:

There is a continuing need for serious discussion of alternative scenarios for an American revolution. I do not believe advocates of electoral activity have offered one.… I feel the formation of counter-communities of struggle and the creation of local pockets of power is the way to begin to find a strategy of revolution.

After favorably quoting Karl Marx, an SDS writer says:

It is important that we begin to talk in terms of five, ten, fifteen years because that is the time and energy it will take to build a Revolutionary movement and socialist political party able to take power in America. At this point, we in SDS must begin to write about and talk about socialist theory, so that we will be prepared to play a major role in developments, creating larger numbers of socialists, and developing socialist consciousness in all institutions in which we organize.

The news media not long ago quoted a top New Leftist as saying: “We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment.” “We are actively organizing sedition.” Another stated: “I think violence is necessary, and it frightens me.”

What does all this mean? That there are young people who disagree with society, who are willing to protest and make their views known—this is all to the good. America needs a questioning generation. It needs young people who will speak up frankly and firmly. The spirit of protest and dissent is inextricably interwoven in the fabric of American society. We want no silent generation. In a dangerous nuclear world, beset with uncertainty and fear, the human spirit will—and must—seek answers.

But when young people, in categorical and dogmatic terms, reject all of society, and reject it with bitterness and disdain, questions should be asked. What is their purpose? What is their vision? What is wrong?

For a better society, conceived on Judaic-Christian realities, cannot be brought about by New Leftism. The New Leftists claim a high moral purpose (“Basically SDS politics stem from disaffection and a moral outrage …”) and a spiritual sensitivity to injustice, intolerance, and unfairness. But how can this be?

When you sweepingly denounce the responsible leadership of the nation, even those who are honestly and sincerely trying to correct the many ills of our society (legitimate reform leaders are regularly lampooned by the New Left), who remains?

When you bitterly distrust the older generation and accuse it of the most base mendacity and dishonesty (usually without proof or facts), where is fairness?

When you find incidents of hypocrisy and sham in our society (there are some), and then indict all of society, overlooking what is good and positive, isn’t this having a distorted vision?

When you speak (as does the New Left) in terms of a dogmatic moralism that considers itself right and all other viewpoints wrong, where are the possibilities of creative dialogue?

When you denounce and denounce and denounce and offer nothing constructive, what happens?

When you constantly view your country as being in the wrong but say nothing really critical about Communism, or Castro, or Mao, or Ho, isn’t this indicative of a preconceived bias?

No concrete proof exists that the New Left is sincerely interested (as it claims) in improving this country. That’s why it is at heart a form of neo-paganism.

The whole mood of the New Left makes the movement particularly susceptible to infiltration and manipulation by the so-called “Old Left”—meaning the Communist Party and the Trotskyites. And that is exactly what is happening. The Communist Party, for example, and its youth front, the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, have deeply imbedded themselves in the New Left—helping organize demonstrations, participating in planning sessions, making policy decisions.

Not that the entire New Left is Communist-dominated. It is not. Some elements of the New Left have criticized the Communist Party. This criticism, however, is not so much opposition to Marxist-Leninist principles as opposition to Communist concepts of discipline and organization. Though sympathetic to Communist aims, they do not want to become Communist members and be caught up in the Party’s bureaucracy.

As part of its youth program, the Party is today making strenuous efforts to reap benefit from the New Left. In a recent discussion of the New Left in the Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs, a writer made these frank comments in an article entitled “Many Can Be Won for Communism:”

I believe it is time for the Party to consider the New Left as a recruiting ground for militant cadre.… Proctor [one of the other writers] is correct in stating that there is a surprisingly large section of the New Left ready to listen to Communists, and willing to see Communist ideas in action. I hasten to add, and to join the Communist Party, if and when the opportunity presents itself. Let us prepare classes, develop open youth leadership, establish social contact with individuals of the New Left, and, in short, bring those whom we can into our ranks. In doing so we will go a long ways towards preparing our Party for the new radical period ahead.

Here is the danger—that a disciplined, experienced revolutionary organization, like the Communist Party, will be able to reach into the variegated, at times almost chaotic, New Left movement, recruit young people, and then train them into revolutionary cadres. Remembering the words of Lenin, the Party realizes that revolutionary zeal, vociferous and outspoken, is not of great value unless it is channeled into revolutionary cadres—the dedicated men and women who are trained for revolution. The tumultuous unpredictability of some of the New Left leaders makes the Party distrustful of them; but the New Left as a movement has given the Party an ideological bonanza undreamed of just a few years ago.

In the book of Isaiah (5:4) is a verse which often comes to my mind:

“What more was there to do for my vineyard,

that I have not done in it?

When I looked for it to yield grapes,

why did it yield wild grapes?”

Why the New Left? What has caused this nihilist group—small in numbers yet potentially great for evil? Why have these wild grapes grown in a society which has lavished so much time, attention, and wealth on its young people, to train them to be responsible citizens?

“We come from homes with all the status tickets,” a New Left student told a newsman. “We were born into comfort and security. Our disaffection comes from having all that society has to offer—and feeling shallow. Other kids have the American dream before them. We were born into the American dream.”

Maybe society has lavished too much of the wrong kind of things on these young people? Too much money for personal use? Too much permissiveness? Too much affluence? A high percentage of college-age New Leftists come from affluent homes—where they have never wanted in the physical things of life. Have too many parents placed a false emphasis in the lives of these young people, stressing the material rather than the spiritual? Have young people been taught to prize what is expedient and easy rather than to work hard and do an acceptable job?

Maybe we have emphasized too much the rights and privileges of the individual rather than his duties and responsibilities?

Just what are the churches doing? Are clergymen and concerned laymen devoting the attention they should to youth? Are they involved in a dialogue—a heart-to-heart conversation—with these young people, endeavoring to answer some of their probing questions about human existence, such as: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What values have meaning?

All of us, clergymen and laymen, need to look deeper into our hearts to answer these questions.

1. We need to know our young people better. Young people want a helping hand, love, care, and nurture. There are too many broken homes, separated families, and failures of the parent-youth relationship. Too many parents don’t know their children today.

2. We must realize that monetary affluence (money, home, swimming pool) cannot by themselves capture a child’s affection. Money is too often used to bribe children—to keep them falsely happy, to simulate a parent-child relationship that doesn’t exist. The irresponsible flabbiness of affluence has become a deterrent to spiritual growth.

3. We need to inculcate in our young people the idea that in a free society the single person counts. Too many of these young people complain of powerlessness, impotence, spiritual sterility. Their vision is distorted. They can, by exercising intelligence, moral example, and initiative, influence the world in which they live. Our society is not, except to the perennial pessimist, a closed, fixed society that defies efforts to change it.

4. We must emphasize that the generations must work together. Trust runs from child to parent and parent to child. Civilization is created by the constant interaction of generations. In a society growing increasingly young, there must be a new respect for the wisdom of the elders.

5. We need to instill a love of country in the hearts of young Americans—that they are heirs of a great tradition of liberty and that if it is to remain meaningful it must be won anew each day. Patriotism is not old-fashioned. Being proud of country and flag is the natural response of concerned and intelligent citizens.

6. We need to encourage our young generation to understand fully that obedience to law is the heart of democratic society. If a person disobeys a law just because he doesn’t like it, or feels it is wrong, this can only bring chaos. Our free society contains constitutional processes whereby laws can be changed. Unilateral disobedience is wrong.

7. Young people must realize that spiritual faith is the ultimate lifeline of fruitful living. God is the eternal hope. Man-made gods, like chips of wood, perish. They hold temporary thrall, but disintegrate in the burning sun of human experience. To live fully, abundantly, and courageously, man needs God.

In the history of the world no figure has reinforced the true and the good more than Jesus of Nazareth, and no book has wielded greater power for godliness and decency than the Bible. To know the Judaic-Christian realities afresh is the great consuming need of the younger generation today, and there is little hope of their renewal unless adults make these commitments their own. Never have the churches—clergy and laity—lived in a time of greater opportunity to exhibit the importance of faith and trust in God and of obedience to his will, and never in the history of our generation would their failure to do so be more calamitous.

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The other night I decided the time had come for a new pair of size 13 slippers.

That disconcerting development set me thinking about how one’s wardrobe is a window on his life. The Harris tweed winter survival coat from Scotland, the suits from Majorca and ties from Amsterdam, the watch from Hong Kong and the wallet from Florence, all reflect bits and pieces of my professional life.

Only these slippers, so little lived in, have survived for twenty-seven long years. And they expired not through wear but through neglect.

I’ve never really learned to hang up my hat. There’s always an inner restlessness—more or less divine, I trust—about a need that’s greater than we think, a conviction that more can be done than most evangelical Christians dream, and with God’s evident blessing.

There’ll come a time, I know, to live in slippers and to hang up my hat. I hope that heaven will offer built-in opportunities for research and reflection and an escape from incessantly ringing telephones, unending stacks of mail, and prescriptions that chain editors permanently to their desks.

Elton Trueblood once remarked that a real editor needs to be a liberated man. The trick is to be liberated without being prematurely liquidated.

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After fifteen years of teaching in a theological seminary—mostly in what the catalogue was pleased to call a systematic theology—I went back to teaching in a college again. I must say that I suffered some shock.

One can assume, for the sake of argument, that all the men who sit in one’s classroom in a theological seminary are at least in favor of the Christian faith, and that most of them are highly committed to it. The difficulties a teacher faces lie primarily in explaining or supporting what is already a given in the theological tradition of the Christian Church. One gives attention to history and doctrine and makes some effort to set up and support a way of looking at the Christian faith. Next comes the business of how this Christian faith is to make contact with the various philosophies and religions of the world and how its relevance may be shown in such areas as social action. One must also give much time to the workings of the church and must, of course, establish reasons why the particular denomination of the seminary has good reasons for continued existence.

In the college milieu, however, there is a whole different set of problems, a whole different set of assumptions and pre-suppositions. One must learn at the outset that the class before him is representative of our pluralistic society, and that while students in the seminary are generally in favor of the Christian faith, college students who are not headed for the seminary may be completely ignorant of that faith. They may even be opposed to it, for a lot of reasons that they consider rational but that may actually be quite irrational. The college battleground is really in Christian apologetics rather than in Christian understanding and application.

It has been interesting for me to learn about some of the assumptions of the present student generation and to see the enormous changes in beliefs that have taken place among students in the last twenty years. The outstanding moral questions on a college campus are somewhere in the neighborhood of liquor, sex, and cheating; but when one faces these problems head on, he discovers that what William Temple once said is very, very true: “All our problems are theological ones.” If you prefer a different vocabulary or a wider sweep, then all our questions are “philosophical ones.” Most students know no philosophy and therefore have never thought through to the foundations of their beliefs.

A philosophy that is now strong in universities and colleges is logical positivism. In its simplest form this means that nothing is really known, or, that, if something is known, the knowledge is not valid unless it can be counted, weighed, or measured in the laboratory. At its worst and in the superficial form, it has come to be known as scientism, in contrast to science. “Seeing is believing.” “I heard it myself.” These are the grounds of knowledge. I remember one student’s saying to me, “I have decided not to believe anything unless I can prove it by laboratory experiment.” I countered, “Prove to me then that you are not a butterfly dreaming you are a college boy.” Thus the conversation ended. If there is what is called an atmosphere or climate of the beliefs in every age, then scientism is the atmosphere of the present student generation.

A second student assumption can be called relativity. Whatever is known cannot be known for sure, and in the last analysis even laboratory science is dependent on the observer as much as on the observed. This is undoubtedly a sound position in astronomy and, as I understand it, in nuclear physics; but serious problems arise if one attempts to bring this principle over into the realm of law and order. This kind of morality keeps defending itself by saying, “Well, that’s what you think.” It turns out that a man’s position is what he happens to think, but there is a question whether what one man thinks may not be more valid than what another man thinks. This question is not plumbed.

The student’s world view is highly departmentalized. I presume we would all agree that a great many churchgoers practice a kind of Sunday religion that has no relevance on Monday, and that it should not be so. In a related error, many, many students think that Christianity is an interesting study, and that some religionists, whatever their religion, have interesting viewpoints. But the idea that there can be a body of truth heading up in a person who can make the claim, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and that this particularism ought to be applied as a world view to every facet of life—this is completely foreign to most collegiate thinking. One can argue that Christianity has no right to make such a claim; but when Christianity does make that claim, one must concede that Christianity is a world view having to do with God, man, redemption, society, business ethics, and eternal destiny. Christianity is not an interesting pastime like stamp-collecting.

One of the strangest discoveries I made about today’s college students was that scientific language is understandable and philosophical or theological language is not. Treating one of the arguments for the existence of God, I discovered that all the students easily handled the argument from the second law of thermodynamics and that whatever could be said about evolution fitted neatly into their way of thinking. Other arguments, however, fell to the ground, rejected as too nebulous, not worth the effort, strange to modern ears.

The theology of evolution is a peculiar business. In the thinking of a college student, everything evolves, though he probably has never looked seriously at Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, or those who followed in their train. To point out some bit of shady evidence regarding evolution automatically marks the professor as not quite bright. The student who says “that’s what you think” about ethical standards swallows evolution happily on the grounds that “everybody knows.”

And this last leads to a very peculiar business. Since their kindergarten days, these students have been trained to discuss everything and have therefore been led to believe that their opinions are pretty good stuff. In college they find it possible to see through everything and everybody except through their own rationalizations about their own behavior. They insist on reasoning everything out. And then they believe in a most irrational way.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

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One-third of the delegates at last December’s National Council of Churches assembly in Miami Beach could not affirm unqualified belief in the reality of God, the divinity of Jesus, or life after death. This startling evidence of the inroads of liberal theology on the leadership of major Protestant denominations comes from the first study of beliefs ever included in the customary poll made at NCC assemblies.

On God, 33 per cent were unable to choose the response, “I know that God really exists and I have no doubts about it.” Most of these agreed with a weaker statement: “While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.”

The statement, “Jesus is the Divine Son of God and I have no doubts about it,” was rejected by 36 per cent of the NCC delegates, most of whom preferred the answer, “While I have some doubts I feel basically that Jesus is Divine.”

Thirty-one per cent of the delegates could not say with complete certainty that “there is a life beyond death.”

Only one out of four believed “the miracles actually happened just as the Bible says they did.” The largest group (35 per cent) chose the “natural causes” explanation, while 26 per cent were either unsure the miracles happened at all or sure they didn’t.

Questionnaires were filled out by 223 voting delegates, as well as a larger number of observers from church councils, local churches, or denominations. The delegate group was quite representative of the geographical and denominational make-up of the NCC. And those who responded were mostly professionals: 70 per cent had attended previous NCC assemblies, two-thirds were ordained clergymen, and 42 per cent were on denominational staffs. Three-fourths were from major metropolitan centers (somewhat over the national average), and only 4 per cent were Negro, compared to 11 per cent in the U. S. population. Nine out of ten NCC delegates were college graduates. Only 6 per cent were under 40 years of age.

The theological questions were based on those used in the 1966 Glock-Stark study, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism. In most cases, the San Francisco area sample used in that study proved more conservative than the NCC elite. For instance, 57 per cent of the Glock-Stark group chose the strong statement on biblical miracles. Also, 57 per cent of the San Francisco sample believed the Virgin Birth is “completely true,” compared to 28 per cent of the Miami delegates. The statement that “the Devil actually exists”’ was held fully true by 38 per cent of the Californians, and only 23 per cent of the NCC leaders.

The lowest percentages at Miami were on the statement that “a child is born into the world already guilty of sin,” a belief not required in many NCC denominations. Only 13 per cent of the delegates as a whole believed this (half the percentage of the California sample). But in the denominational breakdown, the statement was affirmed by one-third of Episcopalians and 61 per cent of Lutherans. The Lutherans were the most traditional group on six of the eight theological questions, with the Episcopalians ranking second.

The Glock-Stark general sample from these two denominations proved less conservative than the NCC delegations. But Disciples of Christ and the American Baptist Convention were just the reverse. For instance, 62 per cent of the American Baptists in the California sample held to the literal truth of Bible miracles, compared with 4 per cent of the ABC’s Miami representatives.

The social-action emphasis in major denominations over recent years is reflected clearly in the NCC poll. A vast majority thought Negro advance was too slow, whereas Newsweek’s major poll last year showed the bulk of the general public thinks it’s too fast. Also, 79 per cent of the NCC delegates believed “discrimination against other races” would “definitely” or “possibly” prevent salvation.

On the reverse side of the coin—factors “absolutely necessary for salvation”—love of neighbor edged out “belief in Jesus Christ as Savior” as most important. Other factors, in order, were: prayer, doing good for others, holding the Bible to be God’s truth, baptism, regular communion, church membership, tithing, and being a member of a particular religious faith.

Summarizing questions on non-Christian religions, the NCC report said: “A Christian monopoly on God’s salvation is, apparently, a fading tenet of Protestant doctrine both among church leaders and local churchmen.”

The social-action theme also came through strongly in a judgment of priorities for missionaries. Ranked as most important was meeting acute human need, followed by working under indigenous churches, leadership training, and conversion. In a separate question, preaching ranked as the least important, followed with a second-place tie between “conversion” and “community and national development.”

In a question on the Viet Nam war, 52 per cent said the United States should start to withdraw troops, 24 per cent said the war should continue on the present level, and 13 per cent favored increased attacks.

Protestant Panorama

The Great Valley Presbyterian Church of Malvern, second-oldest Presbyterian congregation in Pennsylvania, served notice that it does not consider the new “Confession of 1967” compatible with “our historic position” and “does not subscribe to, nor will be subject to” this year’s constitutional changes.

The national organization of Methodist campus ministers decided to dissolve into the sixteen-denomination National Campus Ministry Association. And the Methodist college student movement voted to “phase out” in favor of the University Christian Movement, which includes Orthodox and Roman Catholics. The latter move needs denominational approval next year.

The Methodist Conference in the Caribbean and Central America became independent of British churches after 207 years. The first president is second-generation minister Hugh Sherlock of Jamaica, and the vice-president is prominent Guyana jurist Donald Jackson.

The Primitive Methodist Church (12,000 members) plans a denomination-wide “Spiritual Emphasis Crusade” from World Communion Sunday through Thanksgiving.

United Presbyterian mission planners are floating a trial balloon for flexible appointment of missionaries, to terms ranging from ten years to two years or less. Career appointments could be made after five or ten years.

The council of The American Lutheran Church gave preliminary approval to communion and pulpit fellowship with the three other bodies in the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. The proposals will be voted on at the 1968 Omaha convention.

Personalia

Anglican Bishop Clarence E. Crowther was ordered deported from South Africa by June 30 “in the public interest.” Crowther, 38, vocal foe of the government’s racial segregation policies, will settle in England after a visit to the United States. Since he is an American citizen, the U.S. embassy planned an inquiry.

Fort Wayne, Indiana, pastor John W. Meister, who lost to William P. Thompson in last year’s election for stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church, was chosen executive secretary of the UPC’s Council on Theological Education.

Gordon Henderson, administrative assistant to former Arizona Governor Samuel Goddard, will head a national monitoring campaign for the United Church of Christ to see that radio stations “now heavily weighted with extremist propaganda present other points of view and give persons and organizations attacked on the air an opportunity to reply.”

Jon Reid Kennedy, 25, managing editor of the Christian Beacon, was named chairman of International Christian Youth, U. S. A., college arm of the fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches.

Robert Mounce, formerly of Bethel College in Minnesota, has been named first professor of religious studies at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.

Colonel Emil Nelson, field secretary for thirteen Western states, was named national evangelism consultant of the Salvation Army.

Thomas B. McDormand, who is retiring as president of Eastern Baptist College and Seminary, will become general secretary of the Atlantic United Baptist Convention in Canada.

Miscellany

Universalist-rooted Crane Theological School at Tufts University will close in June, 1968, because it is a financial drag on the university. Tufts will continue its religion department. The Unitarian Universalist Association is in the midst of a year’s study on whether to merge its other two small seminaries, Meadville in Chicago and Starr-King in Berkeley.

The executive committee of the World Student Christian Federation met in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to plan a world student conference for the summer of 1968 in Finland. An announcement said “the program will feature seminars on new universities, rich and poor nations, politics, technology, and urbanization.”

Members of Ottawa’s Bethel Pentecostal Church spent fourteen months producing a forty-eight-pound handwritten Bible for Canada’s centennial. Among chapter-writers were Prime Minister Lester Pearson and provincial premiers.

Roman Catholic laymen in Wilmington, Delaware, organized to push resolution of a dispute between Editor John O’Connor of Delmarva Dialog, recently judged the best diocesan weekly in its class, and Bishop Michael Hyle. O’Connor resigned after Hyle urged three of his backers on the board to resign. The bishop blames financial problems for the dispute, while the editor blames opposition from conservatives.