Page 5913 – Christianity Today (2024)

EDITORIALS

Contemporary American society exhibits a curious combination of greater moral sensitivity and increasing immoral behavior. It is good to see concern for the rights of minorities, the wrongs against the environment, the improvement of the lot of the poor, and the propriety of the conduct of the Viet Nam war. But no one need take these concerns as harbingers of an impending millennium, for along with them has come an increase in vandalism, shop-lifting, cheating in schools, crime in the streets, and so-called white-collar crime. Tax evasion and political corruption persist at appallingly high levels. Shoddiness in manufacturing and in service, deception in advertising and in salesmanship, absenteeism and laziness on the job, drunkdriving and, perhaps even worse, the continued toleration of it, marital infidelity and break-ups—these are but a few of the signs of the essential and pervasive wickedness of men.

We rejoice that God in his common grace permits men to rise above the basest levels of behavior on specific issues at certain times. But those who are concerned with destruction in Viet Nam often seem heedless of the destruction of the environment at home. How else explain the immense amount of litter they leave in their wake after assembling to protest or the air- and lung-polluting smoke to which their discarded cigarette butts give testimony? (At least the Army teaches you how to “field-strip” a cigarette!)

It is good that so many in our society are concerned with obedience to the law, but it is distressing that, for example, when the law was enforced against Lieutenant Calley, countless Americans rose up to revile the conscientious jurors and argue that in war anything goes, even the killing of unresisting prisoners. Many of the people who were quick to deny Calley’s responsibility on the grounds of background considerations are just as quick to ignore background factors that help to explain why many men become street criminals or drug addicts.

On the other hand, some Christians need to be reminded that things are not so bad as they could be. (If they were, we wouldn’t be around to talk about it!) Neither are conditions worse now than they have ever been. Almost two thousand years ago the Apostle Paul wrote that men are “filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Rom. 1:29–31).

What has taken place since Paul wrote those words is a gradual, uneven, and often superficial penetration of the Christian ethic throughout the Western world. Respect for others, for work, for authority was inculcated though often violated. There developed a sense of accountability to God for one’s behavior. This influence has been present even though true disciples of Christ and more or less faithful practitioners of New Testament ethics have always been a small minority. But now, especially with the declining sense of future judgment by God, much of this Christian influence is receding, and some Christians talk as if this means the end of the world. Like its advance, the retreat of Christian influence is uneven. The greater moral sensitivities of our time are without substantial parallel in lands with little Christian heritage. What evidence is there, for example, of North Vietnamese concern over atrocities committed by their troops and their Viet Cong allies?

The retreat in many areas of Christian influence on the ethics of Western men should not cause despair. For one thing, our goal should never have been that of making people practice as much of Christian ethics as we could. Christian influence upon behavior apart from a personal relationship to Jesus Christ does indeed contribute to a more just and pleasant society and should certainly not be discouraged, but it counts for little when compared to the leading of men to saving faith in Christ. Our goal is men with a changed relationship to God, which issues in changed behavior. We are not aiming simply for better behavior in itself.

Another reason why we should not despair over the present moral retrogression is that the early Church did not despair even though—hard to believe as it may be—its society was much more vicious and corrupt than ours by almost any measure. What we should do is what the early Church did: live as lights in the midst of a dark world, contrasting consistently good deeds with the works of wrong-doers and of those whose good is partial and inconsistent. We should at the same time hold forth the good news of salvation to all men, even though experience tells us that only a small percentage will respond.

Although the possibility of stemming the tide of immorality should have no effect upon how faithfully we fulfill our Lord’s command to do good and to spread the good news, we can take heart by what has happened before. The early Church prevailed over its enemies and in at least some aspects profoundly influenced the behavior of Western man. Likewise, at a time when the truth was obscured by those who claimed to be its guardians, the Reformation occurred, bringing forth, among other things, a new zeal for the Gospel and for obedience to divinely revealed ethical standards. Perhaps in our own time of decline, God may grant a new resurgence of the truth. But even if he does not, we are to continue our mission in full confidence that ultimately, with the return of Christ, God will prevail.

Shall The Christian Colleges Die?

So serious is the plight of the Christian colleges today that nothing short of a great outpouring of support can save numbers of them from extinction. The situation described in the first essay in this issue compels not only attention but action. Colleges and schools—for secondary as well as higher Christian education is in jeopardy—that are fighting for survival cannot wait for increased government aid, which may, if it comes, be too little and too late. They must have help now and in immediately succeeding years.

According to an estimate by Dr. John A. Mackay (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, May 27, 1966), a quarter to a third of the members of conciliar churches are conservative evangelicals. These millions of Christians are no strangers to God’s material blessings. They have their share of the national wealth; they can, if they respond prayerfully and sacrificially, help Christian education weather the present storm.

The Bible speaks to every age and every situation. A word from God for the educational crisis comes from Haggai 1:3—“Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” In the prophet’s day, God’s people after returning to Jerusalem from exile had been building luxurious homes for themselves instead of rebuilding the temple. God challenged them on the issue of priority. And today the evangelical public must reorder its priorities in respect to Christian education.

We speak with admiration and reverence of our Pilgrim forebears. When they came to New England they had their priorities right; one of the things they did early in the history of the colony was to begin a college for training an educated ministry.

If we let our colleges and schools wither and die, the whole Christian enterprise will suffer calamitously. Without question evangelical private education has been the major source of personnel for missions abroad and for God’s work at home. And much of the Christian leadership among laymen has come from the same source. No Christian may contemplate with equanimity the possible demise of a sizable portion of the evangelical colleges and schools in America.

For God’s people, a need constitutes a call. Our colleges and schools are in great need. Let our answer combine prayer with open-handed giving.

Sex In The College Dorm

The college crisis is not only financial; it is also moral. Nowhere may this be seen more clearly than in the movement toward twenty-four-hour unrestricted visiting privileges in dormitories. Many secular schools quickly capitulated to student demands for “no hours,” and some students in Christian colleges have caught the disease and pressed for relaxed restrictions or none at all.

A survey that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor found that in some colleges (Bennington and Connecticut were cited) male visitors have become “permanent guests” of girls in the dorms. At Yale, which now admits women, Dr. Philip Sarrel operates the Sex Counseling Service. He and his wife, a social worker, when asked by students for their opinion on premarital sex, reply: “It’s just as O.K. not to have it as it is to have it.” Dr. Sarrel notes that his counseling service has helped to keep the pregnancy rate low on the Yale campus. If pregnancy does occur, abortion is available to take care of that problem.

In view of the innate and God-given sexual impulse, for an institution to permit twenty-four-hour visitation is tantamount to approving premarital sex. Surely no thoughtful Christian parent would permit men to visit his daughter in his home and in her bedroom on a twenty-four-hour basis. Nor would he wish for his daughter to live in a dormitory situation that might seriously impair her morals.

Scripture specifically bans (a nasty word in a permissive age) fornication as well as adultery, and includes it in the list of sins that, if unforgiven, keep men out of the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9, 10). A. T. Robertson in his Word Pictures (IV, 119) pithily states about this passage (“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God”): “It is a solemn roll call of the damned even if some of their names are on the church roll in Corinth whether officers or ordinary members.”

Back in the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards preached a powerful sermon about an event that had occurred almost twenty centuries earlier. The sons of Eli the high priest had sunk so low into degeneracy that they were engaged in illicit relations with the women who served “at the entrance of the tent of meeting” (1 Sam. 2:22). God put an end to the house of Eli and pronounced judgment on him “because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them” (1 Sam. 3:13). Eli did reprove his sons; but as Edwards put it, “he reproved them but restrained them not.”

The Bible makes it clear that fornication is wrong. In this decadent age, every Christian college needs to maintain parietal standards that will help to restrain young people from succumbing to sexual temptation. One of the prime contributions of Christian schools is that of helping to form Christian character. And this process can only succeed where there are some “don’t’s” as well as some “do’s.”

Memorial Day Musing

There is no paradox so deep as death. We were born to life, yet live to die. Sometimes through a mother’s death her child gains life. Soldiers, whom we honor at this month’s end, may be called upon to die for the lives of others. Martyrs and heroes may give life to some by relinquishing their own. Christ sacrificed his life, and took it up again, to give our death-filled existences life in the full. But to receive this life we must die to self and live, born anew, in Christ. As Emily Dickinson said:

A death-blow is a life-blow to some

Who, till they died, did not alive become;

Who, had they lived, had died, but when

They died, vitality begun.

Another Demonstration?

Evangelist Billy Graham suggested recently that it might be high time for committed Christians to march on Washington in a demonstration of spiritual concern for the nation (see News, page 40).

“[We would] tell the nation that we believe in God, that Christ is our Saviour, that we believe in love of neighbor, and that the only solution to our national ills is Jesus Christ, that we are concerned about race, war, and pollution—but that our greatest concern is for the spiritual welfare of America and the world,” he declared.

“Suppose a million evangelicals marched down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he conjectured. “It could be a turning point in our generation. Maybe we ought to do it, and make it a positive demonstration.”

The suggestion should not be lightly dismissed or viewed with dismay. Young evangelicals have already led the way with a dozen witness marches in various cities in the past year, and there are probably enough turned-on-to-Jesus young people right now to pull off the largest mass demonstration in American history.

Such an event of positive proclamation would transmit a note of hope to young Americans bogged down in the negativism and dreary pessimism of protest. Graham correctly observes: “Millions are rejecting the materialism, the secularism, and the agnosticism of their elders. They are on a gigantic search for reality, purpose, and meaning.” Jesus Christ alone can satisfy that quest, and evangelicals ought to say so—and show so!

The Christian-witness marches to date have been marked by a discernible, almost tangible presence of love, joy, and unity among participants. Such an outpouring of genuine oneness among one million believers in the shadow of Congress would offer living proof to the nation that Christ succeeds on vital fronts where politics and social action utterly fail. Mass prayer meetings outside the headquarters of government agencies, the Supreme Court, and legislative office buildings would help point up a tragic void in national life.

This gathering would not endorse political positions other than the declaration that Jesus Christ is King of kings. It is regrettable when radio preacher Carl McIntire, for instance, organizes a group of Christians and non-Christians to march on Washington calling, in the name of Christ, for escalation of the war in Indochina. Equally disconcerting are the actions of liberal church leaders who use the Church as a front for their own political projections. Who will, as ambassadors of Christ, declare convincingly that only a turning to him will stop war, whether it be among nations or inside the home down the street?

The huge demonstration Graham proposes would yield important by-products for evangelical Christianity.

It would encourage the cause of biblical unity by providing the occasion for disparate participants to meet one another and to be “one in the Spirit.” Our younger brothers and sisters in the faith, while theologically straight, are not as inclined toward denominational fragmentation and doctrinal fractiousness as their forebears. They would rather make agape than war. Thus the event would stir up a refreshing pan-institutional breeze of the Spirit that might just blow down some of the scandalous walls that now separate evangelicals.

It would provide an outlet and objective for youthful activism. Today’s younger generation wants to stand up and be counted, to be involved, to do something that will help change the world for good. That activist spirit needs to be cultivated and channeled, not condemned.

Some young Christians have already taken to the streets for Christ in another way; a good example is those who conducted witness ministries to demonstrators in the recent wave of anti-war protests (see News, page 41). They have been set aflame Acts-style, boldly and effectively proclaiming Christ where the action is. An evangelical march on Washington could similarly turn on and provide proper group identity for prospective participants now stagnating in churches or otherwise log-jamming the Gospel. It would in essence liberate Jesus from church captivity.

Evangelicals have been conducting Sunday sit-ins for years. Now perhaps it’s time to march. The first steps can be next door or to the desk across the aisle—or even to searchers already in the streets—with the message of life and peace in Jesus. But someday—Washington?

Shutting Down The Government

During the first week of this month Washington experienced a major confrontation in the continuing battle by some members of the younger generation to halt the war in Viet Nam. Shortly before this, approximately 200,000 people had gathered around the Washington Monument to express their dissent peacefully. The attempt to shut down the government was quite different. What is the evangelical to think about all this?

It is evident that the majority of Americans earnestly desire to see the war ended, and that most young people are motivated by good will and genuine idealism. But the Mayday disruption went a good deal beyond all this. To many observers it was apparent that this small percentage of young people are undeniably radical. Many of them are hardbitten Maoists or Trotskyites concerned about Viet Nam not because of the loss of life but because they see there an episode in the historic struggle between communism and capitalism. They would like to see the United States government overthrown. They did not hesitate to use force, fly Viet Cong flags, and make clear what their true ideology is. The success of the authorities in keeping the streets open and the traffic moving shows that such efforts can be contained. But the fact remains that radicals like these are termites eating away at the vital structures of American life and democracy.

Maoists and Trotskyites are anti-God, anti-Christ, and anti-Church. Evangelicals should distinguish clearly between the larger group of young people who are non-violent, well-meaning, and constructive, and this group that is dangerous, dissident, and destructive.

Evangelicals should raise their voices against non-peaceful dissent; they should penetrate the strongholds of the radicals with the Gospel that can transform them; and they should pray earnestly that God will overrule to prevent the radicals from fulfilling unlawful objectives.

Christians who love their country have a twofold responsibility in a chaotic age. One is to reinforce the foundation on which our government is founded. Ours is a government of laws, not of men, and this needs to be affirmed again and again. The other is to be salt and light to the nation, to help to weld it together more firmly, more consistently, and more harmoniously, so that it may endure.

Priming The Top 40

“Put your hand in the hand of the man from Gaililee” is good evangelistic advice reaching millions of people today, with advertisers footing the bill. And Judy Collins sings “Amazing Grace” the same way it’s been sung in churches throughout the land for years, only now it’s a hit tune on rock radio too. It was even recorded in a church so it would have the right effect, we’re told.

Other songs with a Christian message have likewise made the Top 40 hit tune lists. More are coming. Ralph Carmichael’s “Love Is Surrender” is increasingly in demand. New converts in the professional music ranks are beginning to write and sing out for Christ. One snag, however, is listeners’ lack of knowledge of what gospel-message releases are currently available. Thus audience influence is not readily exerted on the ratings.

The Fellowship of Christian Composers has come up with an idea to remedy that information gap—and to keep the Gospel in the Top 40. The group aims to enlist 10,000 young people in a write-in and call-in campaign requesting pop songs with a Christian message. That many kids contacting disc jockeys two or three times a week, it is estimated, will make for the same influence as millions of listeners otherwise. The Sheet, a free monthly containing the words of current heavy-God songs, will keep the young Gospel-pushers cued in to new releases.

It sounds like a good idea to us. The Sheet is available from P.O. Box 6181, Fort Worth, Texas 76115.

Discipleship Plus Forgiveness

Jesus’ standards for discipleship are high. Multitudes then, as now, were eager to make “decisions” for him, but he knew that, regrettably, many of these “commitments” were superficial. On one occasion he startled the crowds around him by saying that no one could be his disciple unless he hated his parents and children and brothers, and even his own life (Luke 14:25–27). In the context of our Lord’s life and his other teachings, it is clear that what he meant was that in the case of conflict between pleasing Christ and pleasing others or oneself, Christ must, without hesitancy, come first. He went on to state that in the eyes of the world, following him was equivalent to bearing a cross like a condemned man on the way to execution.

It is especially noteworthy that immediately after this emphasis on the rigors of discipleship, our Lord stresses the searching and forgiving love of God through the parables of the one (out of 100) lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son (Luke 15:1–23). Each parable in its own way demonstrates that the holiness of God is fully compatible with his mercy, and shows his strenuous activity to draw rebellious men into his family.

As they see multitudes responding to Christ, many of them probably superficially, some supposedly more mature Christians are keen to stress the rigors of discipleship but not so quick to demonstrate eagerness to draw others into the family. As we all so often do, they manifest one or the other of two attitudes when God wants both. The parable of the prodigal son was occasioned by the murmuring of the Pharisees and scribes at the response of the tax collectors and sinners to Christ. To the Pharisees, the main point was not the profligacy of the younger brother or the forgiveness of the father but the hard-heartedness of the outwardly faithful but inwardly unforgiving older brother. In our legitimate concern for discipleship, let us not be or seem to be unforgiving.

The Challenge Of Persecution

Patriarch and Prophets: Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church Today, by Michael Bourdeaux (Praeger, 1970, 359 pp., $10), and The Urgency of Marxist Christian Dialogue, by Herbert Aptheker (Harper & Row, 1970, 196 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Blahoslav Hruby, managing editor, “Religion in Communist Dominated Areas,” New York City.

A matter that should be of great concern to Christians in this country is the plight of religious and political dissenters and of Jews and ethnic minorities in the U.S.S.R and other Communist countries, and the violation of human rights there. Nobody can excuse himself by saying that information on this subject is lacking: several works published in recent years deal in detail with these problems, and Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, a semi-monthly of the National Council of Churches, has been covering this area for the past nine years.

Michael Bourdeaux is a clergyman of the Church of England and the author of two previous books on religion in the Soviet Union. He has now produced yet another timely and important volume.

In some church circles, there is a tendency to be very cautious in dealing with the religious situation in Communist countries. This is said to reflect a desire to work toward a dialogue between East and West and toward a detente. In these circles, it seems, the theology of revolution and Christian dialogue with Marxists are cultivated, while protest—or even prayers—on behalf of harassed and persecuted Christians in the Soviet Union are discouraged.

Bourdeaux’s new book is an urgent reminder to the Christian community and to all who are concerned about freedom and human rights. Its great value is that Bourdeaux, instead of describing the plight of the Russian Orthodox Church today, lets the participants in the present drama of that great church provide their own testimony. The documents cover all aspects of Orthodox Church life and are grouped into nine chapters by such topics as “The Persecution of the Clergy” and “Destruction of Parish Life.”

In the concise and perceptive introduction to his book, finished shortly after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia and dedicated to the people of that country, the author does not pass judgment on the Orthodox establishment, which reached a modus vivendi with the Soviet regime. In a well-balanced ecumenical spirit, Bourdeaux recognizes both the Orthodox establishment and dissent. I fully agree with him when he says: “The problem of balance in the presentation of the two positions has been impossible to solve. This book presents the new voices at length, because they have had only an inadequate platform elsewhere, while officials from the Patriarchate have been able to speak at great conferences of churchmen all over the world.”

These documents, seen in the context of the ever increasing number of letters and appeals coming out of the Soviet Union, show a growing solidarity between the Orthodox religious community striving for freedom and human rights and others struggling for the same goals among intellectuals, students, and various nationalities and religious groups.

Bourdeaux rightly appraises these significant documents as “a convincing testimony to the continued vitality of the Russian Orthodox Church among both young and old, both the little educated and intellectuals, in circ*mstances which would have crushed a purely human agency devoid of the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

To turn from these moving documents to Aptheker’s The Urgency of Marxist-Christian Dialogue is like entering a dream world. Though the book appeared after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, Aptheker writes as if it hadn’t happened. Yet Prague was one of the places where the dialogue he calls for was most advanced, and those who once participated in it are continually attacked in the Communist press. The book has an excellent bibliography and a worthwhile discussion of the views on religion of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but Christians would be better advised to engage in rational, scholarly examination of present Marxist and Communist systems, especially in light of developments since the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the upsurge in anti-Semitism.

The All-Stars Of Christian Education

Adult Education in the Church, edited by Roy Zuck and Gene Getz (Moody, 1970, 383 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by William Boyd, Christian service director, Western Bible Institute, Denver,

The first of the two sections of this book is “Teaching Adults” and includes the entire scope of adult education in a local church. The writers cover the need for adult education, the biblical foundations, the nature and needs of all ages of adults, and the implications of these for instruction, evangelism, training, and lay movements tangential to the church. The second section, “Helping Families,” deals with current pressures on the family, biblical principles relating to it, and preparation for marriage. Also discussed are elements needed to maintain sound family life, such as marital unity, discipline, worship, sex education, and a family educational program. (This section will be available in a separate paperback binding in July.)

Included are such all-star authors as Sisemore, Moberg, Aultman, Brubaker, Loth, Bayly, Feucht, Hendricks, Fields, Richards, and sixteen others. The variety of the authors’ backgrounds enhances the book’s strength. And through excellent organization, the fragmentation, overlapping, and insufficient correlation that often mar a book with multiple authors are not present.

As would be true of any book having twenty-six authors, the individual chapters range from weak to outstanding. Yet the vast majority are good or excellent. There previously was no one book of evangelical flavor with sufficient scope and depth to become a widely accepted text on adult education. This one will undoubtedly be used as the basic textbook in many college classes in Christian education of adults, and will become a supplementary text in Christian-home classes. Although the content of the “Family” section is not weak, its scope is not great enough for the book to become a primary text in this area. In a local church situation, however, the book could well serve as the primary resource book for training in both adult education and family education. In this vein, it is encouraging to note the increased family emphasis in the adult educational ministry of the church.

Surprisingly, nothing is said in the book about the widening influence of small groups in the church. Some of the benefits and dangers in that area might well have been presented along with some biblical principles for use as guidelines.

Those who have been searching for a textbook for adult education in the church will welcome the appearance of this one.

Newly Published

Jesus and Israel, by Jules Isaac (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, 405 pp., $12.50) and The Trial and Death of Jesus, by Haim Cohn (Harper & Row, 1971, 419 pp., $12.50). Two very significant books. Isaac presents a necessary re-emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus and on the evil of anti-Semitism, but both he and Cohn are much too skeptical on the Gospels’ accounts of the trial of Jesus in their attempts to remove blame from Jews. Of course, anyone, Jew or Gentile, who fails to see that Jesus died “for the sins of the whole world” has completely missed the point.

Unhooked, edited by James Adair (Baker, 1971, 159 pp., paperback, $1.25). Seventeen ex-addicts tell their stories. This book makes the heart ache and the spirit leap joyously.

Marriage to a Difficult Man, by Elisabeth D. Dodds (Westminster, 1971, 224 pp., $5.95). The delightful, heart-warming story of the “uncommon union” of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards. A well-written look at the domestic life of America’s greatest theologian.

Quest for a Black Theology, edited by James J. Gardiner and J. Deotis Roberts (Pilgrim, 1971, 111 pp., $5.95). Six leading black theologians each contributed an essay. Topics include the Black Messiah, the ethics of black power, and the blackness of black religion.

A Dispensational Theology, by Charles F. Baker (Grace Bible College [Box 9008, Wyoming, Mich. 49509], 1971, 688 pp., $9.95). The traditional subdivisions of theology, except for ethics, are systematically and clearly considered. The author summarizes various views among conservative Protestants before arguing for his own position. On ecclesiology it represents only that small minority of dispensationalists who believe today’s Church began with Paul rather than Pentecost, but this variation does not mar the overall usefulness of the book.

Prophecy and the Seventies, edited by Charles Lee Feinberg (Moody, 1971, 255 pp., $4.95). Twenty-one messages by nine Bible expositors—including Stephen Olford, John Walvoord, and two Jewish Christians—delivered at a conference in 1970 sponsored by the American Board of Missions to the Jews on its seventy-fifth anniversary.

Environmental Ethics, edited by Donald R. Scoby (Burgess, 1971, 239 pp., paperback, $2.95). Not even the most assiduous reader can expect to keep up with all the new eco-books, but by reading this collection of reprinted and original articles one can at least become aware of the diversity of material and concern that our environmental crisis is provoking

Living With Guilt, by Henry McKeating (Judson, 1971, 125 pp., paperback, $1.95). A good analysis of the neuroses of our times—feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and worthlessness. The author thinks the New Testament contains the key to healing and restoration.

The Listener, by H. S. Vigeveno (Regal, 1971, 153 pp., paperback, $.95). If you want to know what atheists, Black Muslims, or Buddhists think, read this book. The author records his conversations with people of these and other non-Christian persuasions. The information reported here should be important to all concerned Christians.

The Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith, by Malcolm A. Jeeves (Inter-Varsity, 1971, 168 pp., paperback, $2.25). As an alternative to the spate of books available that stress a conflict between science and Scripture, this is a welcome appearance in paperback of a summary of the 1965 International Conference of Science and Faith, which involved three dozen professors who are evangelicals and who are reflective rather than combative on the crucial issues.

Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life, edited by Lewis A. Lawson (Scarecrow, 1971, 299 pp., $7.50). Fourteen articles from the journals of various academic disciplines reveal the diverse influence of the great Dane. Includes a bibliography of over 600 periodical articles in English on Kierkegaard.

Humanistic Psychology: A Christian Interpretation, by John A. Hammes (Grune and Stratton, 1971, 203 pp., $7.95). Here is a good survey of the basic principles of psychological investigation. The author attempts to demonstrate that there is “no disagreement between experimentally established data and those truths proposed by the Christian frame of reference.” An important, well-written book.

The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals 1596–1728, by Robert Middlekauff (Oxford, 1971, 440 pp., $12.50). This great Christian family has long deserved better treatment than the usual caricature. The author makes a very good beginning, with special emphasis on the Mathers’ influence on contemporary and succeeding Americans. In the process he offers an unconventional view of Puritan development on these shores that merits thorough consideration.

Ten Words of Freedom, by Jay G. Williams (Fortress, 1971, 226 pp., paperback, $4.95). A verse-by-verse commentary on the Ten Commandments, useful for one preparing to preach on them.

The line of distinction between study of the religion of Israel and study of the theology of the Old Testament is not always clear. The former focuses on a description of the ideas and actions (both good and bad) that were representative of any given period in Israel’s relationship to the divine. The latter, by contrast, seeks to establish what was normative for Hebrew religion, and its context is that of revelation as described in the Old Testament rather than religion per se. Such a definition presumes, of course, a particular understanding of biblical theology that is not always shared by writers on the subject; in actual fact, some of the books described as Old Testament theologies are actually histories of Israel’s religion, and vice versa.

The Religion Of Israel

Religious history (sometimes indistinguishable from what is called Old Testament theology) is amply covered at all levels. Basic to such a discussion is still the classic work of W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Black, 1907; reprinted with supplements by KTAV, 1969). Smith leans heavily on comparative Semitic materials, drawing much material from primitive Arab cult practices; although his method is inadequate to explain the uniqueness of biblical religion, it does throw much light on externals. For a more theological treatment emphasizing the distinctive element of Israel’s faith in Yahweh as its liberator, Th. C. Vriezen’s The Religion of Ancient Israel (Westminster, translation, 1967) may be recommended. A somewhat more specialized study from the pen of H. H. Rowley, Worship in Ancient Israel (Fortress, 1967), discusses ways in which the worship of Yahweh came into Israel and various aspects of this worship in the temple and the later synagogue. From H. Ringgren comes another general treatment of the subject, Israelite Religion (Fortress, translation, 1966). Ringgren, whose main interest is the period of the monarchy, has written a book of great use to the general reader.

Similarly committed both to comparative methodology and to the uniqueness of Old Testament religion are three by W. F. Albright: Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Doubleday, revised, 1968), From the Stone Age to Christianity (Doubleday, revised, 1957), and Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (London University, 1968). The first volume looks at the subject from the standpoint of modern archaeological research and deals particularly with the period between the conquest and the early monarchy; the second is a more extensive analysis of the developing process of monotheism and might be considered Albright’s classic effort; the third contains the mature reflections of the author on the relation between Israelite and Canaanite religion. Also from the pen of an archaeologist, and graced with a foreward by Albright, is the non-technical survey by J. L. Kelso, Archaeology and the Ancient Testament: The Christian God of the Old Testament vs. the Canaanite Religion (Zondervan, 1968).

Greatly divergent views are represented by the collected essays of certain Old Testament scholars, notably A. Alt’s Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (Blackwell, 1966), I. Engnell’s A Rigid Scrutiny (Vanderbilt, 1969), and M. Noth’s The Laws in the Pentateuch and Other Essays (Oliver and Boyd, 1966). Each of these volumes is made up of selections from the author’s more extensive writings; all are intended for the advanced scholar, and despite their unquestioned value, none of them reflects a particularly conservative attitude toward the biblical sources. For a minority report on Hebrew religion, see Y. Kaufmann’s The Religion of Israel, abridged from an eight-volume Hebrew original (University of Chicago, 1960), a book that should be required reading for all aspiring Old Testament scholars. Kaufmann combines reverence for the Scriptures with a creative approach to critical questions, a combination that has produced considerable stimulation to research as well as its share of controversy.

A number of monographs treating various phases of Canaanite or Israelite religious history could also be mentioned alongside the more general treatments listed above. For research purposes, however, the student should familiarize himself with works on Ugaritic literature, Palestinian archaeology, and Babylonian ritual (cf. our earlier sections on these subjects). Perhaps a coming day will see the production of a much needed major work from an evangelical writer in this fruitful field.

Theology Of The Old Testament

To an earlier generation of theologians, biblical or Old Testament theology was simply the exegetical preparation for doing systematic theology. The older literature in this genre is abundant, and we shall make no attempt to outline the material. Most scholars who write theologies of the Old Testament today have in common a concern that the content of Hebrew theological thought be developed within a historical context. But having said this, we must point out that much difference of opinion exists among the various writers.

To get some idea of the issues involved and the historical development of the subject, the reader should begin with an introductory volume, such as the concise treatment by R. C. Dentan, Preface to Old Testament Theology (Seabury, 1963). Considerably less comprehensive, but important as an apology for a more traditional, Reformed formulation of categories, is E. J. Young’s The Study of Old Testament Theology Today (Revell, 1959). A good survey of seven influential writers on Old Testament theology is Contemporary Old Testament Theologians, edited by Robert Laurin (Judson, 1970).

There is really no “best” textbook on the theology of the Old Testament; the student will be best advised to sample the various volumes mentioned below and learn first-hand the organizing principle used in each. A good starting point is F. F. Bruce’s New Testament Development of Old Testament Themes (Eerdmans, 1968), which opens with a chapter organizing the subject under the category of promise and fulfillment. In actuality, Bruce is arguing against any single “catch-phrase” as dominant within the study of Old Testament theology; he claims that only in light of New Testament fulfillment can a true unity be found (cf. the discussion of von Rad, below).

One approach is to organize the subject under some combination of the doctrines of God, man, and salvation. The older work of L. Koehler, Old Testament Theology (Westminster, translation, 1957), which stresses the concept of God as Lord, contains useful word studies but is marked by the curious description of the cult of Israel as “man’s expedient for his own redemption.” Organized similarly to Koehler, and highly rated for comprehensiveness and clarity, is E. Jacob’s Theology of the Old Testament (Harper, translation, 1958). This volume stresses God’s mastery of history and is, among the theologies organized in the traditional form, perhaps the most useful textbook for students. Although all the theologies noted here are “Christian” in overall point of view, An Outline of Old Testament Theology by Th. C. Vriezen (Westminster, translation, 1958) and A Christian Theology of the Old Testament by G. A. F. Knight (Westminster, 1959) are distinguished by a more definite commitment to a specifically Christian understanding of the Old Testament message. Although it has weaknesses, the latter is characterized by new ways of looking at old subjects and will prove especially useful to the audience for which it was written (i.e., the intelligent churchman). The many paragraphs devoted to Old Testament imagery will be found homiletically useful.

Only two major American works are available representing the traditionally evangelical point of view. In 1948 G. Vos’s useful Biblical Theology (Eerdmans) was published; this was followed in 1962 by J. B. Payne’s Theology of the Older Testament (Zondervan). The former book is rather dated; it fails to consider certain areas of Israel’s thought (e.g. the Wisdom movement) and does not refer to recent theological research. Vos attempts to trace the subject historically, but his subordination of historical matter to categories of traditional covenant theology make the entire work sound more than faintly like another systematic theology. Payne’s work, though significantly different from that of Vos, has been criticized for the same reason. The book is organized on the principle of “testament” or “will” rather than simply “covenant” behind the Hebrew word b’rith (based on Hebrews 9:15 as a starting point!) and constructs its theology on the various relationships involved in this testament. Although each subject is analyzed according to its development throughout ten historical periods, there is little indication of any meaningful distinction between various periods or groups within Israelite history. A European-origin alternative to the two books just mentioned, representing a modified form of dispensationalism, is E. Sauer’s The Dawn of World Redemption (Eerdmans, translation, 1951). Sauer follows a traditional historical outline and can be counted on for a scriptural and sometimes extremely fresh approach to his subject.

Without a doubt the two most influential works in the field are those of the German scholars Walther Eichrodt and Gerhard von Rad. Eichrodt’s Theology of the Old Testament (two volumes, Westminster, translation, 1961, 1967) uses the Covenant concept as the unifying principle and will appeal to those who see theology as firmly rooted in the historical response of the people of God. Especially useful for comparative consideration is Eichrodt’s “Excursus” at the end of the first volume, in which he deals briefly but trenchantly with his competitor von Rad. In his Old Testament Theology (two volumes, Harper & Row, translation, 1962, 1965), von Rad, like Eichrodt, rejects traditional categories of dogmatic theology (although Eichrodt seems to return partially to them in Volume II) and speaks instead of a saving history in the proclamation of God’s mighty works in the context of Israelite worship. Just what relation exists between this proclamation and the actual history of Israel (which is in fact often less than redemptive) is, to von Rad, unimportant; this point is sharply criticized by Eichrodt and modified by some of von Rad’s own students (e.g. R. Rendtorff). The only real point of unity in an Old Testament theology is, for von Rad, the typological exegesis of which he has long been an advocate. Thus we are presented with various “theologies” instead of an Old Testament “theology,” a point that the theological conservative will find difficult to accept.

Three major works from Roman Catholic scholars merit mention. Intended primarily as a students’ handbook is the very useful treatment by P. Heinisch, Theology of the Old Testament (Liturgical Press, translation, 1955). Its approach is systematic (under the headings God, Creation, Human Acts, Life After Death, and Redemption), and only the spelling of the names (following the Douay-Rheims system) and frequent references to papal encyclicals concerning the study of the Bible betray its Catholic heritage. A more ambitious work, P. van Imschoot’s Theology of the Old Testament (Desclee, translation, 1965), again follows dogmatic categories. Especially useful to the specialist are the extensive bibliographies heading each section, which include lesser-known French works along with the standard German and English materials. For the American reader, however, a much more palatable work than either of these is the volume by J. L. McKenzie, The Two-Edged Sword: An Interpretation of the Old Testament (Bruce, 1956). McKenzie’s categories are closer to those of the American biblical-theology movement, and the student wishing to evaluate current Catholic biblical thought might well begin here.

Several additional books will prove very useful for understanding the theology of the Old Testament. H. H. Rowley, the late dean of British Old Testament scholars, has left us two short volumes stressing the unity of the Old Testament and the uniqueness of its theological concepts, though without denying its evident diversity. In The Unity of the Bible (Westminster, 1955) Rowley offers a corrective to tendencies he observed in both church and missionary situations toward an almost complete neglect of the Old Testament. He felt the point of focus had to be the unity of the two testaments, and this forms the burden of his earlier work; by contrast, The Faith of Israel (SCM, 1956) provides a sketch of Old Testament theology. Although no major work on the subject has been written from a conservative evangelical point of view, Rowley’s short study, stressing both revelation through history and revelation through persons, gives some indication of the direction such a book might take.

Equally important in any discussion of Old Testament theology are the works of the American archaeologist and biblical theologian G. E. Wright. Two important monographs, both in the “Studies in Biblical Theology” series (Allenson), are The Old Testament Against Its Environment (1950) and God Who Acts (1952). In the former volume, Wright, like Rowley, is concerned to show the uniqueness of the world of the Bible, a thesis that is introductory to his work in biblical theology. In the second book he portrays Old Testament (and New Testament) theology as a recital of the great acts of God as developed in the salvation history of the testaments. This work has been fundamental in the subsequent development of the biblical-theology movement in North America and should be read by anyone who wants to understand this important trend. A third book by the same author, The Old Testament and Theology (Harper & Row, 1969), is a mature study of the socio-political content of Old Testament thinking about God and a corrective to much current existential emphasis.

Another work stressing the unique contribution of Old Testament theology is the brief treatise of N. H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (Shocken, 1964). It is Snaith’s conviction that a distinctive concept of God is at the root of the distinctiveness of the Old Testament, and so the book becomes a study of Hebrew ideas of God: his holiness, his righteousness, his covenant-love, his election-love, and his Spirit as a life-giving power.

The aforementioned provide just a sampling of the kind of works available from which one interested in biblical theology may choose. Important bibliographies have been provided at several points in the more general surveys, and for specific subjects the bibliographies in the better Bible dictionaries should be consulted.

Old Testament Interpretation

Closely related to Old Testament theology, both as a preliminary study and as beneficiary of the results of that discipline, is the category of Old Testament interpretation. Essays on the subject are numerous, but two particularly useful collections may be found in C. Westermann, editor, Essays on Old Testament Interpretation (John Knox, translation, 1963), and B. W. Anderson, editor, The Old Testament and Christian Faith (Harper & Row, 1963). Both books represent more of a German than American or British contribution, but leading thinkers in the area are included. Among the current literature significant articles have been contributed through the medium of two new Festschriften. Essays by G. E. Wright (“Historical Knowledge and Revelation”) and R. L. Hicks (“Form and Content: A Hermeneutical Application”) are contained in Translating and Understanding the Old Testament, in honor of H. G. May (Abingdon, 1970), edited by H. T. Frank and W. L. Reed. Another important article, “The Limits of Old Testament Interpretation” by the Edinburgh scholar N. W. Porteous, is found in Proclamation and Presence, in honor of G. H. Davies (John Knox, 1970), edited by J. I. Durham and J. R. Porter.

Two books may be mentioned that deal specifically with the relation between the testaments. C. Westermann’s The Old Testament and Jesus Christ (Augsburg, 1970) is a translation of a brief but important German work and pleads for a fresh realization that Christ is relevant to the main sections of the Old Testament and not simply to certain proof-texts. A much more difficult book, but one vital to a study of the relation between the testaments, is J. Barr’s Old and New in Interpretation (SCM, 1966). Here Barr continues arguments begun in his Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961) and closes with an extremely critical analysis of propositional revelation in modern fundamentalism.

Two recent volumes concerned with applying biblical theology to the hermeneutical crisis in the Church are The Authority of the Old Testament (Abingdon, 1967) by J. Bright and Biblical Theology in Crisis (Westminster, 1970) by B. Childs. Bright advocates an American brand of biblical theology as the answer to the embarrassment and confusion the preacher often feels toward his Old Testament; Childs appeals for a reassessment of the biblical-theology movement in view of its current collapse. Significantly, both authors conclude with extended chapters showing how the interpreter might use the principles advocated in approaching certain passages or problems. Childs calls for a return to the Christian canon as the authoritative Scripture with which the theologian is to be concerned vis à vis recent attempts at theologizing from “some form of positivity behind the text, such as Heilsgeschichte, language phenomenology, or in a mode of consciousness illustrated by the text, such as authentic existence or the like.” Coupled with this appeal is another for a recovery of classical exegetical methodology (but not in a pre-critical sense), with its ability to view the Scripture as a whole and to discover therein the “bread of life.”

Significantly, not only Childs but Wright and others have recently taken a new look at the great classical exegetes, particularly Luther and Calvin, whose exegetical work has often been overshadowed by their systematic formulations. We are fortunate today in having access to several works that will help in this recovery. 1969 saw the publication both of J. S. Preus’s From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Belknap) and of an English translation of H. Bornkamm’s important Luther and the Old Testament (Fortress). Major work on Calvin’s exegetical method is still wanting, but for a preliminary bibliography Wright’s article in Translating and Understanding the Old Testament (p. 284) may be consulted.

A corollary to the new interest in classical Christian interpretation is a renewed focus on early rabbinic exegesis. The literature on the subject, particularly from Jewish writers, is voluminous, but pride of place belongs to The Targums and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, 1970) by J. Bowker. Through use of selected portions of Genesis as reflected in the Targum (an interpretive Aramaic translation from the Hebrew Bible) of Pseudo-Jonathan, Bowker has written an introduction to Jewish interpretation that will be of exceptional value both to the specialist and to every student concerned with Jewish Scriptures or Christian origins.

Finally, in the field of homiletical interpretation, anyone concerned with preaching the Old (or New) Testament will want to be familiar with the small work of E. P. Clowney, Preaching and Biblical Theology (Eerdmans, 1961). Clowney represents a combination of abilities as exegete, theologian, and preacher, and calls for a return to great exegetical proclamation through the help of a covenant-oriented biblical theology.

Carl E. Armerding teaches Old Testament at Regent College in Vancouver. He received the B.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Ph.D. from Brandeis. He spent a year in Israel doing post-doctoral study.

SECRETS OF A POSTMISTRESS

Of late there has been a hue and cry about the loss of privacy in American life. Many people seem to sense a threat in the fact that both government and private agencies systematically collect this information about us.

Those who are so profoundly disturbed obviously have never met Mamie, our local postmaster. (Once when I called her “postmistress,” trying my best to be correct, she nearly threw me out of the post office for using suggestive language on government property.)

Mamie knows everything and never forgets a thing—except once in a while to have the mail delivered. When the February issue of one of four magazines came, Mamie apparently remembered that she was still reading the January issue. Both issues arrived at our house the same day with the January issue neatly dogeared where Mamie had marked her place in the continued fiction piece.

The comprehensiveness of her information was brought home to us a few months after we arrived in town. My wife dashed off a postcard to her mother signing it “M.B.” She was interrupted while addressing it and absent-mindedly mailed it with only her mother’s name on the address side.

The following day when she was in the post office Mamie handed her the card saying, “Here’s your card to your mother. You forgot to address it.” Some of our best friends don’t know my wife’s maiden name, but Mamie does.

Where the FBI collects material, Mamie assimilates it and forms a judgment about the character and personality of the individual involved. By carefully studying what various members of the community are reading, she has put together a mental dossier on each that would put the FBI to shame.

Jim Hicks is the “seed catalogue man.” The fact that he earns his living as a consulting economist is to Mamie not nearly so indicative of his character as the fact that he regularly receives seed catalogues.

Sam Furman is the “writer fellow.” Sam, an electrical engineer, receives Writer’s Digest and other publications designed for the professional writer. I don’t know if Sam has ever put a line

on paper, but he’s forever identified in Mamie’s mind as a writer.

I shudder to think what might happen if some unwary student in our town decided to study Communism directly from Communist publications.

You see, in Mamie’s view a man is not what he does but what he reads. And perhaps she’s more profound than she realizes.

SHAKY GROUND UNDER ‘ISRAEL’

As a faithful reader of your magazine, I am continually rewarded by the insights within its pages. But I believe that a Christian periodical is on shaky ground when it ventures to make political position statements other than those which follow directly from Christian tenets. Such an aspect was not obvious in the editorial “Pressures on Israel” (April 9). A statement weighing purely political issues deserves no place in the editorial pages of your fine magazine, unless the writer considers himself privy to information that is otherwise not widely available.

Surely many of your readers feel, contrary to your editorial opinion, that the first step toward peace in the Middle East (in accordance with the November 22, 1967, United Nations Security Council resolution) must be Israel’s return of Egyptian territories obtained as the result of a pre-emptive first-strike war, and that modern warfare makes an illusory “geographical security” a poor exchange for political security. But to elaborate further on this alternate view would be beside the point, for who is to decide between our varying political convictions? Rather, my point is that essentially non-religious pronouncements on clouded issues serve only to dissipate the authority with which, on other occasions, you can effectively relate the claims of Christ to the affairs of men.

Brookline, Mass.

HERE ARE THE ‘FACTS’

With regard to [John Montgomery’s] “Current Religious Thought” column (“The Last Days of the Late, Great Synod of Missouri,” April 9), please note the following facts:

“Non-evangelical theology that espouses non-inerrancy” is not an issue in “the central trouble-spot, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.” Forty-one of the fifty members of the faculty, over their signatures published in Synod’s official organ, stated November 15, 1970:

We affirm with the Constitution of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (Article II) and in keeping with our vows of ordination and installation that we accept without reservation the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the written Word of God and the only rule and norm of faith and of practice and all the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church as a true and unadulterated statement and exposition of the Word of God.

Taking the Scriptures seriously directs Christians, also their theologians, as pilgrims to bring the Word of Life, while there is time, to all who need it, rather than to hover like vultures waiting for churches to die.

“I know you cannot endure evil men.… But I have this against you: you have lost your early love. Think from what a height you have fallen” (Rev. 2:2, 5, NEB).

Secretary of the Faculty

Concordia Seminary

St. Louis, Mo.

I much appreciated Dr. Montgomery’s series on the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church and especially the last installment, despite the chagrin in the Editor’s Note. Christianity needs more men of his caliber who refuse to be mollycoddled into believing that “time” will “implement their mandate and maintain the integrity of the synod’s historic witness without doing irreparable damage to its structure,” for history demonstrates the opposite; who, when they see that a church has departed from the faith, no longer try to work from the inside, but scripturally forsake it, regarding it as apostate; who realize that half of affirming the truth is denying error, in opposition to the doctrinally inclusivistic attitude so prevalent even among evangelicals; who can see an end of being tactful and a need for rebuke, despite pressure groups which would like to minimize doctrine, setting it in contraposition to practice; and whose guide is sola Scriptura. Would that certain other Protestant denominations had men like him!

Cambridge, Mass.

EVIL ARGUMENT

“The Problem of Evil” by Hubert P. Black (April 23) attacks a subject that should receive much more attention than it does.… Dr. Black is to be commended for writing on a subject many short-sighted Christians prefer to avoid. Nevertheless … [his argument] is unacceptable because it contradicts Scripture.

The author tries to defend divine omnipotence. God can do anything, but he limits himself by giving man freedom. Whatever small value this may have relative to omnipotence, it has no bearing on God’s goodness. Can God be good if he grants man freedom, knowing ahead of time what terrible evils man will commit? If God were good, he would not have made such a man.…

Further, the appeal to freedom completely ignores the tragedies of earthquakes in California and Peru, tidal waves in East Pakistan, and the Black Death in medieval Europe. God can control nature, can’t he?… [But] the author contradicts the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in his statement, “God’s power is not limited by natural events that thwart his will but is relative to actual occasions in the sense that they provide the conditions for the exercise of his creative power.” This sentence not only makes God’s acts of creation dependent on a prior existing nature, but also asserts that nature thwarts God’s will. Apparently God cannot prevent tidal waves and earthquakes. The sentence quoted begins by saying that God’s power is not limited, but it ends by nature thwarting God’s power.

Professor of Philosophy

Butler University

Indianapolis, Ind.

The discussion of the problem of evil given in current articles published on the subject might mislead one to suppose that the Scriptures have no contribution to make toward a solution of this problem. Surely the statements of Genesis 50:20 and Romans 8:28 were made by men who had insight into the answer to this question.

Boulder, Colo.

“The Problem of Evil” does not really slip between the horns of the dilemma: if evil exists, how can God be both good and omnipotent?

Though man indeed sins “because he chooses to do so and is responsible and thus culpable,” his sinning act, nevertheless, is predetermined. Only one example is necessary to disprove the article’s contention to the contrary: the greatest sin of all time, the crucifixion of our Lord, was brought about by the “predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23, NASV). Yet human responsibility and guilt for this action are not diminished. Rather they are juxtaposed with divine predetermination in the same verse, “This [Man] … you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put [Him] to death.” Thus, God planned the crucifixion, but men were responsible for its sinfulness. We accept on faith that God is not the author of sin, as James 1:13–17 shows.… From our point of view the problem of evil must remain a problem. God’s predetermination and man’s culpability are equally taught in the Bible. They must be equally accepted. Yet the Christian can rest in the sure hope of the God who works everything—even evil—together for good and his own glory.

Jackson, Miss.

HOW COULD HE?

I was shocked and disappointed to read Eutychus V (“Jesus and Juicy Fruit,” April 23) saying: “I don’t condemn beer drinking.”

(MRS.) GRACE C. MILLER

Anderson, Ind.

John Oman suggested some years ago that the importance of any matter can be measured by the difficulty of defining it. We can understand his point: ordinary things are settled by ordinary explanations, extraordinary things constantly demand further explanation. If you announce that you are “in love,” that may well be understood by someone else who is “in love” but impossible to define to anyone else. In fact, to explain love to someone “in love” sounds like nonsense. Louis Armstrong once said about jazz music, “If I have to explain it to you then you ain’t got it,” or as they are saying in youthful circles today, “If you have to ask what it is you don’t know where it’s at.” There is a measure of truth for us in all this these days as we experience an inundation of information and misinformation, experience, pseudo-experience, and quackery regarding the Holy Spirit. But with others in these confusing times we can try to sort out a few things.

One idea clearly evident from Scripture—and Scripture is the only source for information on this subject—is that the Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of Truth” (John 14:17; 15:26). It would seem, therefore, that he is the subject and source of truth and not the object. When we try to define him we are going at him objectively, and this is quite impossible. We are faced with the same kind of problem when we try to examine our own ego. The ego is always the subject of our examining and not the object of it. In the case of the ego, even our own ego, we can examine only the manifestations of the ego, the outgoing of the person; we can know our own selves essentially only by what shows itself, and the ego never shows itself; in short, we know only indirectly and by implication what the true nature of self or other selves may be. Thus the Holy Spirit is recognized in his works—mighty acts, words of truth, gifts of the Spirit like tongues or healings, fruits of the spirit like love and joy, troublings and anxieties of our own spirits within, reflecting perhaps the work of the Spirit through conscience. And since spiritual things are spiritually discerned, we must be a little hesitant today in passing judgment on all the opinions we hear about manifestations of the Spirit. Since we are directed to “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1), there must often be much to be said on both sides.

The Scriptures also tell us that the Spirit is given to “guide you into all truth” (John 16:17). I take it that these words mean what they say about “all truth.” We hear it said that “all truth is God’s truth,” and surely that statement is true. What other ground for truth can there be except in Truth Himself? It follows, then, does it not, that the work of the Holy Spirit could be manifested in many areas not usually thought of as religious or churchy. William Temple once remarked that on the day of judgment many good people will be surprised to discover that God is interested in many other subjects besides religion. God is surely interested in earthworms and oysters, the stars in their courses and the laughter of children. And if all truth is God’s truth, then good Christian people should rejoice in mathematics and poetry, a nice double play, and statues in the park. In religious circles there has been a constant error, a false dichotomy, concerning the sacred and the secular. The Incarnation should have headed that off long ago; surely the idea of “all truth” in the work of the Holy Spirit forces us to rethink such things. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and “there is a true light that enlightens every man.” Paul says in the first chapter of Romans that even pagans can understand God’s power and deity from the created world, and the wrath of God is against them if they don’t. There is something of the Holy Spirit at work, therefore, in all those who are working on truth, or are concerned with truth, who seek the truth, who wonder, or are troubled, or question. We Christians can rejoice that such seekers are in some measure “in the Spirit” and can earnestly pray that they can recognize what Spirit it is and be led to loyalty and worship.

Another clear office of the Spirit is set forth in these words of our Lord: “He will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:15). Since all things are summed up in Christ and since it is in him that all things “consist,” we can entertain the hope that all seekers after truth will end with Christ. In any case this should be the be-all and end-all for the Christian. Whatever is truly of the Spirit will lead us to Christ. We recognize how this works out in experience. We set ourselves to examine the Spirit only to find that the longer we look at him the more we are looking at Christ. This is a strange and also informative experience: examine the Spirit and he is always pointing away from himself to Christ, so in a sense we miss the Spirit and find Christ. But this is the way it is supposed to be, this is the way the Trinity seems to function: we look at the Spirit and see Christ, who reveals the Father. At this Pentecost season, any sober analysis of the Spirit, therefore, will not, and should not, end with analysis or definition of the Spirit (impossible in spiritual things anyway) but will lead to those things that are essentially visible, the Word become flesh. And Christ incarnate is now in his body, the Church; yet some enthusiasts of the Spirit in our day have forgotten all about the Church. The manifestations of the Spirit will always be related to Christ and therefore always related to the Body of Christ. This is a sobering and controlling fact. The Spirit and the Word are also inevitably bound up together; as the reformers made plain, never the Spirit apart from the Word, never the Word apart from the Spirit.

The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost suggests some other things. Notice on that day, and notice indeed when the Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism, how the observers and the recorders have to shift to figures of speech to tell what happened. The Spirit descended on Jesus “as a dove,” and the phenomenon of Pentecost is described “as it were” tongues of flame and “as it were” the sound of rushing wind. There were no exact words or exact analogies and parallels to describe what happened. Charles Finney in his autobiography describes his experience of the Spirit as the shock of electricity going through his body. In the history of the Church there have been shakers and quakers, ecstasies and outcries. It is not an argument in favor of quackery or against Spirit-filled Christians to point out that there can be some pretty wild manifestations of the coming of the Spirit: this may be one of the expectancies of his coming in some situations. We argue that he comes in sober truth, that he comes with the reading and understanding of the word or in the preaching of the word: yet we cannot dismiss out of hand other manifestations that come outside the ordinary experience and structure of things. Our day is filled with reports of the coming of the Spirit. Is there someone wise enough to tell us just how he has to come, in what manner and with what accompanying phenomena? I think not.

A helpful book for me was The Faith That Rebels by D. S. Cairns. Cairns’s rebellion was against the easy dismissal of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit, the limiting of his work to certain works and ways. This won’t do. The Holy Spirit works when and where and how he pleases. We can expect the gifts of the Spirit and we can expect the fruits of the Spirit, but we cannot expect to be the referee and call the game. It isn’t our game. We are recipients, not directors.

All this leads to something else that is true. “The wind blows where it wills …” (John 3:8). We do not and cannot know whence it comes and whither it goes. The Pneuma of God is something like the pneuma of nature: he has his own ways and his own times and seasons. How refreshing a gentle breeze; how frightening a tornado! So is the Spirit of God.

Music, language, ecstasies, Jesus freaks, glossolalia, strange accounts of strange healings—these and much more are about us in these days. Who is wise enough for these things? Are these all movements of the Spirit of God or are some demonic? Some things we can say for sure: explosiveness, differences, a certain wildness, need not be unexpected. But there are controls. What of the things of Christ, what is the relationship to the Scriptures, what of the building of the body of Christ? Do the gifts of the Spirit also bring with them the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? Against such there is no law, and we shouldn’t try to enforce one.

Addison H. Leitch is professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He has the Th.M. from Pittsburgh Seminary and the Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Among his books is “A Reader’s Introduction to the New Testament.”

Scripture-Sanctioned Revolution

Radical involvement in social change on the part of churchmen allegedly finds wide support in both the Old and the New Testament and in historic behavior patterns of the Christian community. Moses’ ultimatum to Pharaoh and the ensuing rebellious action are often cited as biblical warrant for revolt by a covenant people against a corrupt political and social order. Standing in this line of protest are the great prophets of Israel, more than one of whom spent some time in jail, the reward for bashing their heads against an insensitive establishment. Turning to the New Testament we find the often quoted words of Jesus: “I have come to set fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” And we are assured that Jesus’ followers of post-apostolic days, acting out the moral and ethical implications of the Christain Gospel, were frequently charged with atheism and civil disobedience. On the face of it there appears to be plenty of evidence that biblical religion, far from being inimical to revolution, actually fosters it.

But what kind of revolution? At this point some of us had better do some soul-searching. The revolution supported by Scripture is the revolution that replaces the evil that is in the world with the doing of God’s will. Said Ezekiel: “Ruin! Ruin! I will bring about such ruin as never was before, until the rightful sovereign comes. Then I will give him all” (21:27, NEB). According to the Old Testament, divine judgment rests upon every human enterprise that stands in the way of God’s righteous and holy will. Implied in this insight is the recognition that divine judgment rests upon the economic and political systems of our own day that foster war and widen the gulf between men and nations. But what economic and political system does not do that? Man in his sin is not capable of building God’s kingdom, here or anywhere else. All that man can do is to structure for the day his own systems, out of which violence and strife, always endemic to man, come.

This is not to say that one temporal kingdom is as good as another, or as bad as another. Nor is it to say that the Church ought not to pass discriminating judgment on the works of men and nations. The sovereignty of God works in and through the works of men and nations, and part of the task of the Church is to point to the ways and means through which God’s righteousness is asserting itself in the circ*mstances of life. The God who in ancient times used pagan King Cyrus as well as the spiritually sensitive Isaiah to work his will can, in our time, use a Marxist as well as an Episcopalian to serve his ends. But the goal of God’s work is neither a Marxian state nor an Episcopal kingdom. The goal of biblical revolution is God’s kingdom in which God’s righteousness dwells.

The churchman who insists on God’s righteousness as the goal of the kingdom will be no less discriminating about the means of bringing it in. The means must be as demanding as the goal. For the sake of argument let us assume that in a particular social situation today, a Marxian solution would make for a more “just” order than the existing one. From this it does not follow that the Christian can either condone or use the means a Marxist uses to achieve his end. The Christian does not deal in human relativities when presenting the mind and will of Christ.

When we study the biblical mandate for revolution, we find the context illuminating. The command of the Lord through Moses to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!,” is invariably coupled with the plea, “that they may serve me in the wilderness.” The prophets most vocal in condemning incompetence and corruption—Isaiah, Amos, and Jeremiah—are the ones who eventually moved furthest toward grace. Their final plea is not for a new social order but for a new covenant between man and God. The purpose of Jesus’ one militant act—the cleansing of the temple—was to restore the room as a house of prayer for all people.

As the most significant works that Jesus’ followers can hope to do, the New Testament cites acts of mercy, love, forgiveness, gentleness, which are the fruits of the spirit of Christ (1 Cor. 13; Matt. 5:7). The New Testament Christians who turned the world upside down wielded the sword of Christ’s spirit.

What disturbs me in the situation today is that some of our clerical revolutionaries, like Jesus’ tempter in the wilderness, want to short-cut the means. They say that there isn’t time to wait for men to love the Lord their God with all their heart, and their neighbors as themselves. They would love the neighbor as Che Guevara loved him, half hoping that from the ruin of a no-good world something better is bound to rise. They want a kingdom now that men and women can manipulate while they are still in their sins. This isn’t necessarily an ignoble or unworthy goal. It is always being tried, and sometimes the new order proves to be an improvement—though often temporary—over the old. But we should not confuse this kind of kingdom with the kingdom of God and his righteousness, which Christians are asked to seek first.—The Reverend VICTOR FIDDES, Westminster United Church, Regina, Saskatchewan.

Turbulence is no stranger to the Christian campus, but the intensity varies from year to year, as do the issues. Although evangelical colleges have been spared the embarrassment of open student rebellions, the more subdued forms of dissent have been plentiful. Some of the dissent is mature. Some is not. Be that as it may, CHRISTIANITY TODAYfeels that responsible student spokesmen deserve a wider hearing among church leaders as well as among rank-and-file churchgoers. We present a selection of editorial comment—on a variety of topics—from evangelical college newspapers published during the current academic year.

From The Oracle, Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma:

Militancy is essentially unknown at ORU. Riots, demonstrations, and the marks of unseemly mass behavior simply do not exist. We proceed in an undeniably orderly fashion, pacified if not peaceful.

Our purpose is not to condemn this prevailing air of calm. Assuming the proper role of the University to be teaching and inquiry, reason and rationale, the proper atmosphere of the university should be an atmosphere conducive to quiet reflection, and intensive and extensive study. Our question: is our pacified campus used for this active pursuit of wisdom? Or are we employing peace as a facade to mask an intellectual void and a dearth of problem-solving creativity? What do we do in our state of peace?

Demonstrations, whether in a peaceful or militant context, tend to rely on two initial and subsequent states for their manifestation. First: problem awareness—essentially a process of education, also implying the formulation of attitude and opinion. Second: conviction and a motivation—reflecting just “how much” we believe what we believe. The progression may be expressed as “know, believe, show.”

The conflict comes in the methodology we employ in demonstrating our convictions. The activities of many of our academic brothers would seem to tell us that burning buildings, shouting obscenities and half-formed, half-proved theories, and usurping temporary authority results in studies by Presidential commissions, chaos, tragedy, and very little more. But, what do we have to show for our peacefulness?…

Unfortunately, learning and thinking do not always proceed concurrently. It takes extra energy to become aware, even more energy to act. As an individual, do you have a well-formed opinion as to the whys, wherefores and solutions for Viet Nam, environmental control, racial tension? If not, why not?… Is peace your condition, or your alibi?

Heaven forbid that our pacified campus might be a grave.

From Weather Vane, Eastern Mennonite College, Harrisonburg, Virginia:

Western culture has developed a terrible compulsion—an affliction which compels us to try to institutionalize nature. We don’t just admire a flower in its natural state, we pick it and take it home so everyone can see the beautiful wilted flower.

We don’t sneak up on deer and try to capture their beauty and grace by taking pictures, we sneak up on them and shoot them. Then we cut off their heads and mount them on our walls so everyone can admire the superiority of our guns over the deer’s quickness.

The proposal to build a prayer chapel on the hill behind the administration building is another manifestation of our compulsion to defile.

The hill has always been one of the most sacred spots on campus. Innumerable prayers have been offered while gazing over the panorama offered by that vantage point.… So along comes Western man and says we have to put four walls and a roof up there so we can pray without getting grass stains on our suits.

The Harman Foundation undoubtedly had good intentions in offering the gift. The administration can’t be blamed for accepting the gift. Forty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money—particularly in these days when the economy and therefore gift givers are acting rather anemic. Maybe an argument could even be made that the college needs a prayer chapel more than anything else.

But the college does not need to build a prayer chapel on the hill thereby ruining the chapel God has already built. Not even a rustic prayer chapel. Not even a $45,000 rustic prayer chapel.

If a prayer chapel must be built, let it be built on some vacant land in a less sacred spot.

Better yet, why not let the EMC students do their praying in their hearts and use the money to answer some prayers. The Black Scholarship Fund would look a lot better with a $45,000 transfusion. There are people in Pakistan, in Chicago and even in Virginia who would certainly be glad to have nourishing food.

Is it really necessary to defile our hill?

From The Tartan, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts:

Just when winter slump starts to set in, and alleged conspiracies and “general escalations” send nihilistic shivers up and down our spines, something good happens like the election of Michael Harrington to a seat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Harrington, of course, is our own representative to the House in Washington. The Armed Services Committee, of course, is the committee that molds and passes recommendations on the Defense Department budget. The combination of the two, Harrington and the Armed Services Committee, just about destroys our faith in the total depravity of the House.

Harrington went to Washington vowing to do all he could to subvert the seniority system which renders new congressmen powerless for their first four or five terms. On top of this, Harrington entered as a vociferous dove and established himself in opposition to old political politics.

This kind of stance for a new representative wasn’t expected to win all kinds of friends for Harrington among the Geritol crowd which holds power in the House. When he spoke at Gordon last term, Harrington said that his most effective role as a representative would be outside the House, helping new-style politicians get elected and educating the people to the reform needed in the House and in policy-making sectors of the government. With his election, Harrington will have a direct voice on allocations of defense funds.

Harrington’s victory is encouraging also because he apparently defeated an organized opposition. His chief opponent for the seat was Louise Day Hicks, a symbol of conservatism, although much of the pressure against Harrington came from higher places.…

He was elected despite this pressure. His response was characteristic, promising to push toward a reordering of priorities in the defense budget.

Which is exactly what we need.

From The Wheaton Record, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois:

Thursday evening, January 21, interested people from Wheaton and surrounding communities were privileged to hear Dr. George Wald, eminent Harvard biology professor and Nobel Laureate, lecture in Edman Chapel.… In short order, Wald not only rejected any supernatural but quickly went on to develop a clearly materialistic philosophy that held that man was merely a collection of atoms and that such “human” characteristics as fatherly concern were solely a result of the organization of these atoms.…

He accepts the entire evolutionary bag, from the initial plasma cloud, through the chance synthesis of organic (carbon chain) compounds, to man. He then applies the same principles of natural selection to the social order, claiming that democracy is the height of the process, the ultimate form of government.

And yet rather than let evolution take its course Wald hopes to arouse public action to oppose those very forces of natural selection he affirms. To applaud the natural selection process in the social sphere and in the same breath to lament the plight of the “little man” at the hands of the gigantic corporations basking in their evolutionary “fitness” seems to me inconsistent.

However, this inconsistency seems to me not nearly so grave as the problems of value that Wald seems to create for himself. What does Wald do when faced with someone who does not share Wald’s concern for pollution, but rather by virtue of the organization of his atoms has a deep concern for himself?

Perhaps this man is organized selfishly, perhaps he wants to pollute. Is the organization of Wald’s atoms right and those of his adversary wrong? And who decides this kind of question? Without an external moral standard Wald seems caught in the inconsistency of making seemingly objective statements of value like “the whole noble human enterprise.”

Doubtless Wald has a concern for humanity, shown perhaps most vividly in his abhorrence of the possibility of nuclear suicide. Yet, as he spoke of how terrible that would be, I tried to put myself in his philosophical shoes, so to speak. As I sat in my seat with visions of the earth as one gigantic glowing cinder, I remarked to myself, perhaps a trifle bitterly, “What would be so bad about that? The atoms could always reorganize.”

From Chimes, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan:

Last Monday night the faculty approved a Student Religious Activities Committee proposal which calls for the suspension of the current regulations imposing regular chapel attendance on students and sets forth a number of avenues for encouraging “lively, significant, and well-attended chapels on campus,” attendance of which is a matter of individual responsibility.

The faculty refused to name their plan “voluntary” chapel because they felt that “voluntary” implied a take-it-or-leave-it attitude which failed to reflect the necessity for communal worship in the institutional life of a Christian academic community. Nevertheless, according to the most commonly understood meaning of the term, Calvin College is about to establish a system of voluntary chapel which acknowledges that the college, by definition, requires the explicit worship of God in addition to the implicit worship carried on in the classroom, library, and coffee shop, a system which demands the active support of everyone who claims to belong to this community, but a system which places the decision of whether to attend a specific service and which service to attend completely in the province of individual responsibility. No more Polaroids, warning letters from the chaplain, six-skips-and-you’re-out.

The faculty’s action is the culmination of years of persuasion and pressure by multitudes of people. But finally reason and trust have won out; finally a majority of the faculty have become convinced that students possess “a reasonable degree of Christian commitment and maturity.” The despair and disillusionment which were created almost every year when the issue of “compulsory chapel” was raised—almost every year in recent memory, that is—are forever dispelled now that the faculty has agreed that willing worship is more likely to engender “a higher degree of spirituality” than forced worship.

But the quest for a vibrant program of significant, voluntarily-joined worship services is only half finished. The burden of responsibility for establishing a new tradition of voluntary chapel now passes to the student body, who must respond to the challenge of the faculty by manifesting a commitment to the communal worship of God [unnecessary] under the old system.…

From The Houghton Star, Houghton College, Houghton, New York:

Because of the rejection of the Christian presuppositions, the most challenging task facing the Church of Jesus Christ is the redefining and reinstatement of the Christian world view as a viable intellectual alternative to modern secular society. The Christian educational institution must bear the responsibility of that task. Such a responsibility demands that the Christian college or university move out of its higher level Sunday school syndrome into an intellectual community dedicated to the investigation of the philosophical content of Christianity found in both Holy Scriptures and doctrines of the historical Church. Our concern should not be with relating Christianity to a particular discipline but rather formulating and developing disciplines which are based upon the Christian presuppositions. For example, psychologists who are Christians should not be concerned with relating psychology to Christianity, but rather developing a Christian psychology which is one discipline within the perspective of the Christian world view.…

The student must endeavor to fully understand to the best of his ability the Christian philosophy. He must abandon any view that he previously had of faith as a non-intellectual subject and discipline himself to the serious study of the intellectual content of the Christian faith. The student must follow this path or cease to call himself a student. The Christian college is not a state college, and the difference does not lie in the fact that we have stricter rules or longer skirts but rather in the basic Christian philosophy to which we adhere. Any student who cannot commit himself to the intellectual investigation of the Christian faith within his areas of study has no place in this academic community.

The deepest problems of secular liberal-arts education today stem from the theory that truth and values are relative, a fallout of this generation’s commitment to evolutionary perspectives. The loss of authoritative norms explains, in part, the strident student shift from reason and persuasion to mob pressure and compulsion. An evolutionary perspective provides no basis for universal and enduring human rights or responsibilities, nor can it fix normative limits of escalation or deescalation of protest and disruption. It cannot, in fact, supply any fixed norms of ethics whatever, or any unchanging truths.

Amid lost confidence in liberal learning on secular campuses, evangelical students have—and yet neglect—a tremendous opportunity to counter radical assaults on liberal education by their own kind of demonstrations. To face the reality of the supernatural, the objectivity of truth and values, and the moral and spiritual significance of Jesus of Nazareth is crucial to any honest system of education and culture. Yet few issues are more evaded, and more arbitrarily prejudged, than these.

Nowhere, apparently, has a vanguard of evangelical students raised the pivotal questions bypassed in most modern classrooms, by pinpointing the failure of secular faculties to wrestle with the ever critical problems of the history of thought that are decisive for human dignity and the role of reason in society. Who is God if he is? What is moral?—and so what? Is any truth final? Is Christ just a “four-letter word”? These are great issues that believing collegians should be demonstrating for. However much some of us might cringe at placards and banners, they are an in-thing that bespeaks the importance of symbols in a mass-media age, and they can be appropriated to bring visibility to the really important questions of life.

Why do evangelical students by and large take less initiative for the triumph of truth than for the triumph of grace? Our evangelical colleges champion the Christocentric view of life. But they often fail to dissect the life-situations and thought-struggles that inundate most people today. Amid basic efforts to preserve and herald the truth of the Gospel, they forgo a direct confrontation over the truth of truth and the meaning of meaning. Too easily evangelical dialogue bounces within personal and pietistic dimensions when, in fact, it ought to grapple with the very survival of civilization.

The image that evangelical colleges present to the world must embrace truth, justice, and grace as concerns indispensable to Christian education. We are debtors not simply to the evangelical community but to the whole modern world in which we live. Evangelical schools bear this global duty in respect to truth no less than evangelical missions bear a world-wide task in respect to grace.

Over half the world population is sealed against overt evangelical proclamation. But the other half is locked up far more than we realize to American evangelical resources for its impressions of the credibility of Christianity. As never before our global burden in these harried years is one of intellectually responsible formulation and communication of the truth. Classrooms where teachers and students use reason to face the agenda of the world, grapple with ideas in the context of the truth of revelation, and apply the test of coherence to every truth-claim are the launch-pads of this witness. Valid ideas presented precisely and attractively through every available means can and must be the stock-in-trade of evangelical education.

The mission of the evangelical college is nothing less than to make known the whole truth for the whole man for new life in a new world. Only a comprehensive perspective like this can undermine the presumptive definitions of human nature and destiny posed by utopian ideologies, speculative rationalisms, and self-fulfillment theories, and can illumine the vision of the ideal man and society by the truth of revelation. This banner maintains, moreover, the indispensable and indissoluble bond linking truth, justice, and grace, and by claiming this present world for God’s spiritual purpose in creation, reopens man’s soul to the eternal transcendent world.

SCIENCE AT THE SECOND COMING

By self-learned charms Pankrator Science flies

Over myths and shadows to the truths of sense.

Iron eyes on scarlet stock, fey with surmise,

Decode all things, miniscule and immense.

Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,

Nature now composes one pragmatic crown.

Roentgen-eyed and flush, Science flies to baste

Seamless truth in one theoretic gown.

Inmost fate says no. The cloud-compelling smith,

Unprogrammed Truth, smites Science in the eyes.

The web is rent, the skeins are split; and myth

Decodes into judgment, free from surmise.

Science avows its Lord, but legions find

Horror before them, vanity behind.

DAVID S. BERKELEY

Unveiling the reality of the supernatural and expounding the special method whereby God and his ways are to be known demand an intellectual precision that draws the world of unbelief and doubt inescapably into the crossfire of ideas. For this engagement Bible departments must be keen and exciting, philosophy classes powerful and relevant. Campus achievements exhibited to donors and alumni must involve victories of Christian thought and truth more than physical expansion, athletic prowess, even evangelistic endeavor.

To say, as some do, that the distinctive contribution of Christianity to the world of learning and life is one of perspective, is not enough. To be sure, the Christian view of God and the cosmos and man does involve a unique perspective on the whole of reality. But so, for that matter, does Buddhism, or any other ism one cares to mention. The unique contribution of biblical religion is the truth of revelation and its implications for human redemption and destiny.

Only if—as we believe—revelational truth is of one and the same order as all other truth, or, as Christians also contend, if the validity of any and all truth depends ultimately on the truth of God and his revelation, have we a platform for integrated learning in the context of Judeo-Christian revelation. Christian education that overstresses the uniqueness of the Christian perspective without attending seriously also to the final truth of the Christian revelation faces rough going in the seething world of thought. Nor is it enough simply to affirm the validity of the Christian revelation; nothing less than lucid marshalling of intellectual evidence will make plain why evangelicals are convinced that they have meshed mind with the eternal world.

If, on the other hand, the truth of revelation is truth of a different order, truth whose validity and authority rest simply on subjective preference or internal decision, then we ought to conserve our time and energy and explore the possibilities of merger with Zen Buddhism.

The world we seek to confront is precommitted to evolution as the ultimate explanatory principle, and the limitation of knowledge to the horizons of human history. Unless we grapple with these prejudices, what seem to us to be bold and brave claims for faith will appear to others as tender-minded credulity. It will not do, therefore, to portray the evangelical campus to the world simply as an institution that believes in the inerrancy of the Bible. To be sure, the Word of God cannot be broken, and the authority and plenary inspiration of Scripture is a foundational affirmation. But our day of intellectual relativism and moral nothingness (even amid notable social concern) requires more than formulas that are mainly intended to reassure apprehensive evangelical donors.

In a 1965 statement, spokesmen for faith-affirming colleges concurred that “the over-all purpose of the evangelical college, as a distinct type of institution, is to present the whole truth, with a view to the rational integration of learning in the context of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ revelation, and to promote the realization of Christian values in student character.”

Only if evangelical learning highlights and vindicates the presuppositions of this umbrella-statement will this comprehensive purpose become significant. For the contemporary mind neither concedes nor comprehends that knowledge is a unitary whole; that integration is ideally rational; that divine revelation supplies the ideal context for integration; that “Judeo-Christian” revelation is incomparably unique; that academic learning has inescapable implications for a student’s moral outlook and behaviour. Because the academic mood on many campuses is implicitly if not overtly naturalistic and relativistic, demonstrating the viability of evangelical alternatives requires an earnest wrestling with undergirding convictions. As the 1965 statement put it, our faith-affirming colleges are called to exhibit “the rational integration of the major fields of learning in the context of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ revelation.” Without a fulfillment of this intellectual priority, non-theistic views, however weak, will remain pervasively influential, while Christian theism, however superior, remains notably unimpressive.

If we take seriously the biblical correlation of learning and values, knowledge and piety, then our schools will strive to graduate men and women who not only know the truth of revelation but also live the real life. We are not in the business of producing Übermenschen or philosopher-kings, but students for whom Jesus Christ is Logos and Light and Life. No one in the moral history of the West has been more unjustifiably reduced to a footnote in modern texts on ethics than Jesus of Nazareth; in an age suffocating with moral pollution, evangelical colleges have the opportunity to rectify this injustice in word and deed.

Christian education needs to recapture the ethical excitement of this dimension of Christian learning and witness. Forged mainly in terms of negations, as often happens, Christian ethical concern soon loses its critically important role of illuminating the line between morality and immorality in terms of the truth of revelation and scriptural principles of conduct. To say this is not to decry campus rules, nor to imply that the alcohol traffic, the tobacco industry, and the cinema no longer pose any moral issues. Indeed, it is ironical that some evangelical schools relaxed rules on movie attendance precisely at a time when X-rated films began to deluge the theaters; and on smoking just when medical research convinced even government agencies to discourage the cigarette habit. Evangelical colleges could become a moral force in our drifting society by training disciplined, dedicated young people who are able to discuss intelligently the issues of our time—from abortion to vivisection and voodoo and Zen. If recent American politics has failed to inspire youth to anything higher than opting out of the system and its commitments, then evangelical education has the special opportunity of integrating the issues of truth, righteousness, and justice in a claim from which no human being can drop out and still remain human.

We should note, moreover, that in expounding “the whole truth, with a view to rational integration … in the context of ‘Judeo-Christian revelation,’” the faith-affirming colleges in the 1965 declaration consider the Bible to be “an integrating force” and “not merely … an additive.” The Christian Apostle to the Gentiles set even the atoning sacrifice and bodily resurrection of the crucified Jesus in this scriptural context; fundamentally important to the Christian message, he avers, is “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised the third day according to the scriptures …” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4).

This rationale for human life and destiny seems as alien to the modern mind as it did to the Athenians when Paul first proclaimed it. The most conspicuous difference between the first and the twentieth centuries is not that the Christian rationale as such now seems foreign. It is, rather, that for modern man, every speculative alternative has lost credibility. Another difference is that much of the Christian task force today, despite its impressive endowments and properties and libraries, its salaried personnel and small army of young followers, lacks the boldness of apostolic times to put the world on the defensive.

While Christian education centers in the manifestation of God in Christ, evangelical colleges have always sensed the need for a more explicit and articulate delineation of basic beliefs. The theological ambiguity of modern ecumenism has, in fact, unwittingly created fresh respect for succinctly stated positions; open-ended pluralistic ruminations on Christian identity are falling out of fashion if not out of favor. Once again, in a day when ecumenical institutions are more concerned with with structure than with truth, the great ecumenical creeds—particularly the Apostles’ and Nicene—provide a basis for stressing central articles of Christian faith. In view of its criterion of the Scriptures as the divine rule of faith and practice, a tenet reaffirmed by the Protestant Reformation, evangelical education holds the ecumenical creeds of Christendom to be proximate normative expressions of the historic Christian faith.

Totalitarianism or even tax-supported education is hampered by the interests or antagonisms of ruling forces; evangelical education, on the other hand, thrives where and because open competition prevails in the world of ideas, and can best serve where it fulfills its specific mission with competence. In a non-evangelical college, a student may easily accumulate a kaleidoscopic confusion of views gleaned from left-of-center liberals, conservatives, naturalistic philosophers, relativistic anthropologists, and Marxist economists, with one or two demonstrative burn-the-building-and-de-stroy-the-system activists thrown in for good measure. In such a time as this, it will be scant credit to evangelical education, however, merely to be able to label itself as unlike other education. As far back as 1945 the Harvard Report on General Education in a Free Society saw no possibility of a return to theistically oriented education. How much more today, then, do faith-affirming colleges have the unique responsibility of propelling a systematic theistic view into a naturalistic climate, and of delineating the unified view of life required by revelational theism.

Carl F. H. Henry is editor-at-large ofChristianity Today, professor-at-large of Eastern Baptist Seminary, and vice-president of the directors of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. He is currently visiting professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Education in America, which began with Christian colleges and schools, is in trouble. Private education in particular is facing the greatest crisis in the nearly three and a half centuries of its history. Many independent and private institutions are confronting difficulties that threaten their survival. The shift from black to red has become the common rather than exceptional outcome of annual operations—a trend that, if not checked, will certainly decimate the independent colleges and schools of the nation.

“But for years education has been crying poor,” someone says. “Are things really so critical?” The answer is yes. The New Depression in Higher Education (McGraw-Hill, 1971) by Earl F. Cheit reports an intensive study made for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Judging from a cross section of American colleges and universities, Dr. Cheit, former vice-chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, concludes that two-thirds of public and private higher institutions are either having financial troubles right now or are moving toward them. In The Red and the Black, William F. Jellema, research director of the Association of American Colleges, presents the preliminary report of the association’s study of the current and projected financial state of private colleges. A comprehensive questionnaire, sent to most of the independent, accredited four-year colleges in the nation, elicited replies from three-quarters of them. According to the report, the “average” institution among the 554 respondents concluded its annual operations with a net current fund surplus of $39,000 for the year 1967–68; this has now changed to a projected current deficit for 1970–71 of $115,000. No wonder Dr. Jellema says: “Private colleges and universities are apprehensive and they have reason to be. Most colleges are staying in the red and they are getting redder, while colleges in the black are generally growing grayer.”

Averages, however, reflect individual cases. At Columbia the 1970–71 deficit is estimated at $15.3 million. At Princeton, the deficit grew from $1 million last year to about $2.5 million this year. Johns Hopkins estimates a $4.3 million deficit this year. And President Nathan A. Pusey of Harvard, which has a billion-dollar endowment, states in his eighteenth annual report: “Fiscally it [1969–70] was the first year during the Pusey administration when the University did not operate safely in the black.” Deficits are jeopardizing the future of hundreds of other private institutions and of many independent secondary schools, especially those with resident enrollments.

The reason for the deficits is plain. Tuition and other student fees do not fully meet costs of accredited education. Other income—from gifts, endowment, foundations, and federal and state aid—is progressively lagging behind soaring operating costs.

Tuition has been raised so high that it deters enrollment and threatens scholarship funds. (Yale, where annual charges have risen to $4,400, now has a plan under which students may defer up to 18 per cent of the tuition and make repayments at an adjusted percentage of their gross income over a period of thirty-five years after graduation.)

Dipping into unrestricted endowment has in numerous instances led to borrowing to meet current obligations, and this has added heavy interest charges to budgets. Moreover, disruption and violence on campuses have made headline news even though only a minority of schools are implicated, and this has fostered a suspicion of higher education that damages its support.

This, then, is the general scene. And the Christian colleges and schools stand right in the middle of it all. In some areas, such as campus disorders, their problems are far less than those of secular institutions; in others, particularly finances, their problems are if anything more severe. They too are struggling with the inflation spiral and insufficient income, and their administrators are voicing deep concern. When asked, “What do you predict for American higher education ten years from now?” Dr. Hudson T. Armerding of Wheaton College summed matters up like this: “There is a possibility that private higher education as we now know it may not be in existence ten years from now. It will prevail only if the American public believes that the distinctiveness is worth preserving” (Ladies Home Journal, Sept. 1970).

In a statement discussing the dilemma of Christian higher education, Dr. John W. Snyder, who has moved from the presidency of Westmont College to become vice-chancellor of the University of California at Santa Barbara, says, “But you, the reader, must make a decision too. Without your support in very real terms, Christian higher education can well become a thing of the past.” A recent letter to the constituency of Houghton College from President Stephen W. Paine refers to that Christian campus as “unthreatened by the shadow of fear that creeps ahead of student unrest” but goes on to remark, “A shadow does threaten Houghton, however, a chronic lack of funds.…” At Seattle Pacific College, President David L. McKenna, after discussing financial problems in his 1970 report, makes this discerning comment: “The immediate threat … is that there will be an educational deficit created by low salaries, limited instructional equipment, inadequate library resources, and deferred maintenance on a beautiful campus. The will to live is strong, but the will to live effectively is stronger.”

Here Dr. McKenna identifies the critical point beyond which no college or school, least of all a Christian one, dares go. A chronic operating deficit inevitably pushes an institution into an educational deficit. And Christian education cannot slip into a decline in quality without imperiling its very reason for being. In the balances are nothing less than the hard-won gains of the last three decades, during which many Christian colleges and schools have built up their campuses, developed and deepened their programs, and gained full accreditation. If the principle that Christian education stands obligated to excellence for the glory of God is valid, then for our colleges and schools to be driven into the morass of quality deficits would be tragic and ultimately suicidal.

So much for the crisis. What can be done about it? No understanding observer would question that Christian institutions are making sincere and prayerful efforts to continue and to do so on more than a mere survival basis. But not all well-meant policies are wise. One of the hazards of crisis is the temptation to adopt palliative measures that may only aggravate problems. There are no panaceas for present difficulties. Every educational administrator knows that his institution must rescrutinize its operations and learn to practice every economy compatible with maintaining quality, which can never be negotiable. Instead of proceeding on a day-by-day expediency, a college should have, as Dr. Joseph A. Kershaw, professor of economics at Williams College, has said, a clear and comprehensive plan of how it expects to live through the present stress, which may last for years. Faculty, because their welfare is linked with that of the institution, must know the difficulties the school faces and what it is doing about them. Change in both the structure and the practice of education must be considered.

Because Christian education is committed to the living Lord in whom all things hold together and who makes all things new, it need never fear change, even sweeping change. The biblical world view is spacious enough to comprehend all truth and all necessary change. Therefore, Christian education must explore new paths, though this may mean breaking with traditional ways of doing things. Not only shifts like restructuring the curriculum or reordering the academic calendar, but such things as the consortium plan, in which colleges share their resources (ten Christian colleges—Gordon, Eastern Mennonite, Messiah, Taylor, Bethel, Wheaton, Greenville, Seattle Pacific, Malone, and Westmont—are already involved in such a plan, see April 9 issue, page 44), and other new patterns of student life and extramural learning, require consideration. Historically, independent education has made some of the great forward steps in teaching and learning. Christian institutions must realize that responsiveness to new situations and varying needs can be entirely compatible with unchanging doctrine and abiding spiritual values.

Dr. Earl F. Cheit, whose New Depression in Education has already been mentioned, names in this book three things colleges and universities must do to surmount their economic problems: First, they must show they are “reasonably governable”; second, they “must demonstrate that they are reasonably efficient in their internal operations”; third, they must have “a unifying set of purposes … that the supporting public can understand and defer to.”

Measured by such requirements, the confessing Christian colleges richly deserve support. They have not had violence on their campuses. To be sure, their students are by no means free from the impatience and rebellion of youth today, nor do all their students escape the pitfalls of present-day society. Yet there are Christian colleges and secondary schools that are showing they can relate to the restless student mind and can do so in a context of prayer, trust, and love. As for the reasonably efficient internal operation of which Dr. Cheit speaks, few institutions have had more experience in dollar-stretching than the Christian colleges and schools. And when it comes to unified purpose, if there is one distinctive that puts Christian education in a class by itself, it is the definiteness of its purpose. Christian education knows its identity. It is committed to the unity of all truth in God and to the integration of all fields of learning with the biblical world view. It knows what it is for and where it is going. Judged by these criteria, then, it deserves adequate support.

But is it getting it? Honesty compels a blunt no, and some plain speaking is in order. A crisis cannot last indefinitely; it has to be resolved either favorably or unfavorably. So with private Christian institutions today. These schools must have greatly renewed and enlarged support or else suffer mortal damage. Mere maintenance of their present level of support would be tantamount to a vote for their shutdown.

Where is this help to come from? There are only two avenues—government or private sources.

A proposal linking indirect federal aid with private giving comes from Congressman John B. Anderson (R.-Ill.). He has introduced a bill in the House enabling persons who contribute up to $100 to a college or university of their choice to subtract that amount from their federal tax, providing it does not exceed 20 per cent of their tax liability. Corporations would also receive a tax credit on gifts up to $5,000, providing it does not exceed 10 per cent of their tax liability. If enacted into law, this plan might well lead to increased giving.

Meanwhile, four-year colleges are now facing a definite decrease in federal assistance. Urban renewal, transportation, and ecological needs are competing with education for tax dollars. Aid to junior colleges and community colleges is outrunning that available to private four-year colleges and universities. The pinch comes particularly in relation to capital funds. One Christian liberal-arts college had top priority in its state for capital funds needed to begin a new science building, but the state had no federal money to dispense.

To accept or reject federal aid is a matter of conscience that different Christian institutions will determine differently. But those that decide to accept it stand on shaky ground if they put their hope for survival in government funds.

The other source of help is private giving. Recent federal legislation limiting the lifespan of foundations and requiring them to distribute principal as well as income will doubtless be reflected in more foundation support for independent education. And in support from its entire constituency—alumni, parents, friends, churches, indeed the Christian public as a whole—lies the chief hope for resolution of the crisis. But this hope will not be realized without radical changes in present patterns of stewardship.

Christian education is the poor relation of many evangelical givers. Maturity in stewardship entails the capacity to see beyond immediate results and to support enterprises having long-range goals. Certain forms of witness and outreach bring quick and often dramatic responses. This is neither to decry their importance nor to begrudge the help they receive. Compared with these more spectacular enterprises, Christian education, like a time bomb, has delayed results. Also like a time bomb, it does not always go off—a fact it shares with all forms of witness. So it takes maturity in stewardship to support Christian education.

Another mark of maturity is resistance to superficial judgments. As has already been said, the shocking breakdown of control on some campuses has bred a mood of disillusionment with higher education. Such an attitude, which spreads by a kind of osmosis, ought not to hamper giving to Christian institutions, which have been free from violence and disruption. Likewise, maturity carries with it an understanding tolerance that does not confuse nonessentials with vital issues. For a college or school to lose support, as some most regrettably have, because of students’ dress or hair styles, points to inability to understand that these outward changes should not be equated with departure from the faith.

But more must be said. Despite recession and inflation, this remains an affluent society. Important exceptions there are, and the existence of so many poor and disadvantaged among us stands out as a sore spot in our national life. But evangelicals by and large belong to the majority sometimes called middle America. On the one hand, the cost of living has gone up; on the other hand, as a feature article in the New York Times (December 9, 1970) shows, opulence is becoming a way of life for the middle class. Even reckoned in inflation-adjusted dollars, the earnings of the average family rose from $6,900 to $9,400 during the last decade. Many a Christian family is in the $12,000-plus bracket and has color TV sets, two or more cars, and other luxuries. Advertisem*nts for expensive foreign travel dot the pages of Christian periodicals. One speaks of these things not judgmentally but factually; they are signs of material prosperity. And as one contemplates them, some of the things the New Testament says about stewardship come to mind.

To what extent is our Christian giving sacrificial? What was our Lord really saying to us when he commended the widow who gave her two mites? Have we ever given up anything—the purchase of the latest model car, an additional TV, a better hi-fi set, a luxury vacation—for the sake of giving more to Christian enterprises? These are not comfortable questions. Yet they may show us that a more mature pattern of giving, one that includes even modest sacrifices of what some euphemistically call “the good things of life” and persuade themselves they simply must have, could greatly help Christian education continue its important work.

If our colleges and schools are being winnowed in this time of troubles, the faithfulness of their constituencies is no less being sifted. The kind of stewardship with which Christians respond now and in the next few years will make the difference between life and death for not a few worthy Christian institutions. Colleges or schools die in different ways—some by merger and consequent loss of identity, others by closing through bankruptcy, others by slow bleeding through diminishing enrollment resulting from a decline into mediocrity. Every good institution lost will mean a larger deficit in Christian leadership while secularism and materialism continue to offer stones to people who are starving for lack of the bread of life. It will mean the curtailing of the kind of education that can fill the empty place in young lives—and this at a time when youth so greatly need the unambiguous presentation of Christ and his claims upon them.

But if the Christian public, realizing the extent to which future leadership in all forms of Christian life and service is at stake, would prayerfully revise their giving so that at least a third of it would go to education committed to the biblical world view and the maintenance of quality to the glory of God, then the crisis could be surmounted.

Frank E. Gaebelein is headmaster emeritus of the Stony Brook School and former co-editor ofChristianity Today.Two of his books, “Christian Education in a Democracy” and “The Pattern of God’s Truth,” are widely recognized contributions to the field of Christian education.

In this issue we call attention to the plight of Christian higher education and its pressing need for the prayers, encouragement, and financial help of God’s people. A school can perform no greater service to the nation and to the world than to boldly declare its fidelity to Jesus Christ and his Gospel and to educate men and women in the Christian life and world view. One of the most effective ways for the Church to encourage social betterment is to send capable, Christ-loving young people into the world of men to witness and to serve as professional men, businessmen, teachers, politicians, voters, parents—not to mention missionaries and ministers and full-time Christian workers.

We managed to go to press with this issue on time despite the threats of the anti-war demonstrators to seal off access to downtown Washington and thus shut down government operations. There were moments of unpleasantness; “trashing” was common, and here and there traffic was slowed to a crawl. While a city bus with one of our staff members aboard stopped for a traffic light, several demonstrators pulled out valve stems from the tires, and our colleague was obliged to finish his journey to the office au pied. But then, probably more walking would be beneficial to us all. After the Monday effort ground to a halt, Tuesday dawned bright, fair, windy, and generally peaceful. We hope the end of the Mayday thrust also marks the end of what is surely a less than persuasive way of making dissent known.

The debate between Hans Küng and Karl Rahner is surely one of the most remarkable events within today’s remarkable period of Roman Catholic history. The debate was struck off by the appearance of Küng’s book, Infallible? An Inquiry. Rahner responded vigorously to the book by saying that if Küng continued to theologize along these lines, he would have to be dealt with theologically as a “liberal Protestant.” To Rahner, Küng’s views were rationalistic, a clear transgression of the limits for any Catholic critique of the church’s infallible teaching authority.

Understandably, Rahner’s sharp attack was hard for Küng to digest. He responded, in two lengthy articles, by saying that he owed his understanding of the time-conditioned and limited character of dogma to Rahner himself.

In the March edition of “Stimmen der Zeit,” Karl Rahner offered his reply to Küng’s response to him. It is clear that Rahner is not about to take back anything from what he has often said about the history of dogma. Dogma is historically conditioned and time-bound, and therefore always remains an inadequate, human formulation of God’s absolute truth. This is exactly what Küng, too, has insisted, what he has developed, and what, he says, he has learned from Rahner himself.

But now a crucial disagreement rises between Rahner and Küng. Rahner distinguishes between the relativity, inadequacy, and limitation of dogma on one hand and any element of error on the other. Say what one must of the relativity of dogma, it is, in its infallibility, kept free from all error, according to Rahner. He characterizes his way of doing theology as “system-immanent.” What he means is that he works within the Catholic system of infallible teaching. Any element of error would be an attack on the system.

The fact that dogma is affected by its time and circ*mstances implies that we may and must interpret it. But we must also respect the truth, which has always been embodied in dogma. We must bow before the unchanging truth guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, who was given to the church to lead it into truth. To interpret dogma is another matter than to give dogma a new meaning. From this it is clear that the nature of interpretation plays a crucial role in Rahner’s thinking. If one works within the system, he is bound to see to it that all the new interpretations of dogma (e.g. Mariology, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass) come out in agreement with what the church intended to express in them. The motto of Paul VI applies to dogma: “What was, is.”

Küng has been working for over a decade with all sorts of historical and exegetical questions that surround the notion of infallibility. Obvious errors have been made, Küng has argued, that demonstrate the relativity of the church’s teaching authority. And, he has said, exegesis has compelled the church to rethink its convictions about the primate and offices of the church.

Küng has looked at the church’s history a good deal more critically than has Rahner. It is not as though Küng does not believe that the Holy Spirit has guided the church through its history. He does contend that the Spirit’s guidance—as promised by the Lord—means that the church will not swerve from the truth in a fundamental sense. But he does not think that the Spirit guarantees immunity from all danger or error.

In taking account of what Rahner has said about dogma, we cannot avoid the impression that there remains severe tension. For example: Rahner criticized the traditional interpretation of the saying, “no salvation outside the church,” as being “rigoristic”—harsh. But this expression is not just another theologian’s word. It comes from church doctrine; it was used in the Council of Florence (1439) to exclude Jews, heathen, schismatics, and heretics from the possibility of salvation. Later the expression was softened, as, for example, by Pius IX in the nineteenth century. A distinction was drawn between what was done in ignorance and what was done in willed persistence; only in the latter instance was one excluded from salvation. When, in 1949, the American theologian Feeney wanted to use the ancient expression against American secularization, the Holy Office instructed Cardinal Cushing that Feeney’s interpretation was intolerably rigoristic. Subsequently, Feeney was excommunicated in the famous Boston heresy case.

Thus we note a significant shift in one of the important utterances of the church about the exclusiveness of salvation. A transition was made from a rigorous to a flexible or mild interpretation. Rahner opts for the milder. His feelings were expressed in his view of “anonymous Christianity.” Here he took a broad and tolerant view of those who were otherwise thought of as “outside” the walls. Now, my point is that it seems impossible to contend that what is now interpreted as the real meaning of “no salvation outside the church” is what was intended in earlier days.

Hans Küng has insisted that Catholics should openly admit that profound changes have taken place in the understanding of church dogma. He wants Catholics to stop insisting that the church has always and really taught one and the same truth.

But Rahner has chosen not to accept Küng’s way. He opts for the other solution: there has been no change; there has only been interpretation. The task is to keep interpretation within the unchangeable and infallible dogma of the church. Everything that can be said about the time-conditioned character of dogma must be said without threatening the absolute teaching authority of the church.

Rahner, in short, has elected to follow the path of the traditional construction of the infallible church—all his well-known progressive tendencies notwithstanding. As a result, a kind of necessity, even coercion, hangs over all interpretation of dogma. Any critical testing of dogma by the Word of God has a hard time finding a place within Rahner’s “system-immanent.”

Rahner says that in his last semester of lectures on dogmatics he has had a biblical exegete present. But this is hardly convincing. The real question is whether we can tolerate a disturbance in the development of dogma when the Word of God tests it. At bottom, Rahner’s notion of the untouchability of the infallible dogma sets us before the same problem as that faced by Luther and Calvin. I do not mean to say that Kung is really a crypto-Protestant and that Rahner is at heart a conservative Roman Catholic dogmatician. The business is too complicated for that.

But Küng does put his finger on very weighty problems of tradition (historical development and historical changes), and calls the church to reconsider its understanding of the infallibility of the church and the pope. At this critical period in the church, Rahner has taken up the case for the traditional doctrine. The conservatives in the church will surely be obliged to him. But the problem that Küng puts on the agenda cannot be resolved by summoning up the traditional stand. The problem will stay there, and will finally be decisive for the future of Roman Catholicism.