Page 6010 – Christianity Today (2024)

Richard Milhous Nixon first saw the light of day fifty-six years ago in a California home in which Quaker parents frowned on anything having the marks of violence. They believed also in the biblical admonition, “Be still and know that I am God.” In his inaugural address as President of the United States, he picked up these two themes.

The speech put priority on “peace.” And it is time, he said, for the nation’s malcontents to lower their voices “until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

Nixon only alluded to a few tangibles—housing, education, better cities, full employment. The crisis for the nation, he said, does not primarily lie in these. “We have found ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.” The challenge is a “crisis of the spirit.” The remedy: “an answer of the spirit … and to find that answer, we need only look within ourselves.”

The inauguration was covered with religious trappings. Quipped Religious News Service’s Elliott Wright: “That was one of the finest church services I ever witnessed. Billy Graham prayed, Terry Cooke pronounced the benediction, and Dick Nixon preached the sermon. Certainly, that message had the preacher’s art to it.”

Nixon “preached” his message before the biggest congregation ever, using as his text: “The times are on the side of peace.”

When his former political foe Chief Justice Earl Warren administered the oath, Nixon placed his hand on two open family Bibles held by the new First Lady. They were opened to Isaiah 2:4, the millennial promise that there will be no more war. Nixon’s swearing-in probably had more of a religious tone than any other since that of Washington, who after taking the thirty-five-word oath, kissed the Bible and said, “So help me God.”

Earlier in the day, the President and First Lady, Vice-President and Mrs. Spiro T. Agnew, and the Agnew daughters joined 800 others at the State Department in what is believed to be the first ecumenical prayer service ever an official part of an inauguration. The religious service that was a part of Washington’s inauguration was highly Anglican, reflecting his religious stance. This time, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were listed in the program.

New Cabinet members William Rogers, Melvin Laird, David Kennedy, Maurice Stans, and George Romney and their wives were among the worshipers.

At the service, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church called the nation to spiritual renewal. Washington’s Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle intoned a benediction that had been offered by the first U.S. Catholic bishop, John Carroll. Rabbi Jacob Rudin, president of the Synagogue Council of America, and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood sounded themes of spiritual renewal.

There have been non-official religious observances surrounding most other inaugurations. In 1965, for instance, Graham preached an inaugural sermon at President Johnson’s request. Although it preceded the inaugural by little more than two hours, it was not part of the official program. This year’s Religious Observance Committee was headed by Judge Boyd Leedom, an evangelical and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. National Association of Evangelicals General Director Clyde W. Taylor also played an important role.

Also an official part of the day was the request for the pealing of church bells across the land for three minutes, and a simultaneous call to prayer.

Five clergymen prayed at the inaugural ceremony. In the invocation Louisville’s AMEZ Bishop C. Ewbank Tucker asked God’s guidance for the new President in his “herculean responsibilities.” Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin, since 1915 the spiritual leader of Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple, traced the American ideal of freedom and liberty from creation. He asked God’s direction in a civilization that is not perfect.

After Agnew—an Episcopalian of Greek extraction—took the vice-presidential oath, Archbishop Iakovos, Eastern Orthodox primate for the western world, prayed that President Nixon would have illumination of mind, “so that through his words and pronouncements and deeds, he may lead us to a new appreciation of all that is true, honest, just, pure and of good intention, both in government and society.”

Graham prayed: “Help us in this day to turn from our sins and to turn by simple faith to the One who said, ‘Ye must be born again.’ So we pray, O God, as we enter a new era, that we as a nation may experience a moral and spiritual restoration” (full text of Tucker and Graham prayers, page 27).

In the benediction, New York’s Catholic Archbishop Terence Cooke asked that a nation aware of its problems might continue under God’s guidance to be “united, a nation indivisible.”

At the Nixon-Agnew family luncheon following the swearing-in, Nixon remarked to congressmen and other invited guests: “The five invocations given today were all prayed to the same God, who is in this room, and each of those invocations will read well in history.” Graham and Iakovos had participated in Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration four years earlier.

Graham’s prayer and Nixon’s message sounded much the same tone, and some Washington newsmen began speculating that the evangelist might have been called in to help draft the speech, as erstwhile Southern Baptist preacher Bill Moyers had done for Johnson.

Pope Paul VI cabled from Rome to Nixon: “As you solemnly undertake the responsibilities of your high office, we ask God to protect and guide you, to grant success to your efforts for unity and peace, and to bestow copious blessings upon you, your family and the beloved people of the United States of America.”

As the accolades and well-wishing got under way, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, made it known that he would be pounding on the White House door. “His message had no sense of urgency and no sensitivity to the basic problems of hunger, poverty and race,” Abernathy said.

A PRESIDENT ‘UPHELD BY PRAYERS’

With nearly 3,000 persons jammed into a Washington, D.C., ballroom for the annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast January 30, President Richard M. Nixon said he carries on his shoulders the hopes of the nation’s religious people, but added, “I am upheld by their prayers.”

The President, in one of his first public appearances since his inauguration, said a random sampling of his mail indicates a strong mood of prayer in the nation. He called this a splendid sign when “religion is not fashionable … and skepticism is on the upturn.”

Flanked by all members of the Cabinet—the first time in the seventeen-year history of the breakfasts—the President said the government is “dedicated” to the prospect of getting at the problems of the nation. He reiterated his inaugural theme that the nation’s ills are primarily spiritual in nature (see story above).

Evangelist Billy Graham, the main speaker, said the nation is guilty of “over-self-criticism—we have too much introspection … This is a great country—this is a great system.…” Graham said the problems of poverty, race, and war are really “problems of the heart, problems of the spirit.… If we can solve this problems we can have peace »»

Graham’s abbreviated five-minute message (things were running a half-hour late) ended on a strong evangelistic note: “You can have this salvation if you’ll get alone with yourself sometime today and confess that you are a sinner.”

Vice President Spiro Agnew described the Episcopal faith of his mother and the Greek Orthodoxy of his father as of less importance than the manner in which they lived. “My father always had an expression for someone he liked—‘he was a good man.’ What he meant was not that he was wealthy, good-looking … but that he lived a good life.”

A Farewell To L.B.J.

On his last full day as President of the United States, honorary deacon Lyndon B. Johnson attended National City Christian Church and heard a 238-word prayer for the nation that he had written.

“Thou hast blessed America greatly; may we, in the conduct of her affairs, be always worthy in Thy sight—and in the sight of our fellow man,” recited the Rev. George Davis. “Lift our visions, Father, renew our faith in Thee, and in ourselves. Stir our spirits and disturb our consciences that we may seek not rest from our labors but right for neighbors.” The President also asked help for the needy, trust in the young, blindness to skin color, and an end of hate and violence.

Though many prominent Disciples took issue with Johnsonian policies, Christian Church President A. Dale Fiers wired the denomination’s most famous member that “we rejoice in the many achievements of your administration.… Your Church … is proud of the leadership and faithful service you have given our country and the world.”

White House Preacher

It was a busy fortnight for Billy Graham. The evangelist delivered the main prayer at President Nixon’s inauguration and later preached at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (see page 30). In between, he spoke at a private service on President Nixon’s first Sunday in the White House, and at the twenty-fifth anniversary banquet for Youth For Christ, of which Graham was the first full-time evangelist.

Nixon has said the White House service, first of its kind, will be a regular practice on Sundays when he is in Washington. Some 200 guests, including eight Cabinet members and eight White House telephone operators, heard Graham tell how Solomon’s search for pleasure through wealth, sex, and wisdom brought no lasting satisfaction. Graham said man finds fulfillment and satisfaction only in Jesus Christ.

The service was followed by a coffee hour where guests met and talked with President and Mrs. Nixon and Mr. and Mrs. Graham. At future services, speakers from various denominations will preside, including Roman Catholic prelates. However, Mass will not be recited. Attendance will be voluntary.

At the YFC banquet in Chicago, attended by new Illinois Governor Richard Ogilvie and 2,000 others, Graham said that in a world of rapid change, the nature of God, the Word of God, the nature of man, the moral law, and the way of salvation have not changed.

‘Pueblo’ Prayer

Crew members of the U. S. S. Pueblo told of writing out Scripture passages in lieu of Bibles and praying surreptitiously during their eleven months of imprisonment in North Korea.

Details of the secret “services” were disclosed last month by Navy chaplains who talked to the crew after their release on December 23. The Navy Chief of Chaplains, Rear Admiral James W. Kelly, related reports “that almost to the man Protestant and Catholic crew members during their confinement had moved in the direction of a deeper religious commitment, greater faith, and habitual prayer life.”

In the forefront of the effort to minister to the spiritual needs of the captors was Lieutenant Stephen Harris, an official Navy “lay leader.” The 30-year-old Harris has been identified as the research-operations officer aboard the Pueblo, a position for which the command line was somewhat ambiguous. Harris was expected to take the stand in the Navy’s inquiry into the Pueblo seizure. Commander Lloyd Bucher, captain of the ship, testified that he had less than adequate control over the intelligence operation headed by Harris.

Those questions notwithstanding, Harris told the chaplains how he had given up efforts to have worship services aboard the Pueblo before the capture because never more than two men showed up. But things changed during the confinement.

“Some of the men said their memories of Sunday School days were dim,” declared Kelly, “but they worked together to come up with a reasonably accurate list of the books of the Bible. Such familiar Scriptures as the Twenty-third Psalm were written out and shared. One mentioned that he had trouble remembering the Ten Commandments but with help came up with them. It seems everyone prayed openly before one another, although they had to avoid being seen in acts of worship by their captors.

“They had no Bibles or religious materials. No worship services were permitted. They were told, ‘The Russians shot God down with a rocket!’

“They were reprimanded for thanking God for their food (potato soup, rice, and turnips). They were told, ‘These are the gifts of the Korean people.’”

Kelly said the chaplains were told that “missionaries and ministers were held up to scorn by the North Koreans. They presented a picture of a priest sicking his dog on a child and another of a missionary branding a small boy in the forehead with the word ‘thief’ for stealing an apple. The Pueblo men were told that every cross in Korea was an antenna for sending espionage messages.”

A petty officer was quoted as saying. “I left religion out of my life when I joined the Navy. I have a Japanese wife, and two lovely children who just love Sunday school, but I haven’t helped my wife to become a Christian or encouraged the children. It is going to be different now.”

Lebanon: Student Power

In the United States, collegians protest against war and the draft; in Lebanon, they have gone on strike to press stronger military defense and a compulsory one-year draft. The reason: Israeli commandos’ raid on the Beirut airport (see January 31 issue, page 36). As one Arabic newspaper put it, “Lebanon has entered the June 5 war.”

The student strike began at Roman Catholic St. Joseph’s University after the airport raid, but had begun to trail off by mid-January. All students are pledged to return to class when the cabinet gives priority to their demands. A group at American University urged immediate military training of college students, and frontier fortification. Violence was kept to a minimum by the strikers, though one U. S. teacher was beaten at American University.

Students at Haigazian College, an Armenian Protestant school, were not generally enthusiastic about the strike but joined it four days late. Armenian reluctance to join an anti-government, anti-Israeli, pro-Arab strike points up another long-standing Mideast problem, the animosity between Muslims and Christians. The tension in Lebanon has been acute at times, as in 1958 when fighting broke out between the two groups and U. S. Marines landed to rescue Americans. Some Lebanese Christians even say that “if the Arab countries didn’t have Israel to fight, they would turn on Lebanon,” whose population is at least half Christian.

Lebanon has been protected by international cooperation and, it believes, left alone because of its small size. The country did not participate actively in the June, 1967, war with Israel. Although there were pro-Arab demonstrations, the country has been much less belligerent than other Arab lands.

Lebanon uses a “confessional representation” system of government—each religious group gets legislative seats on a percentage basis. Some groups, including student organizations, are dissatisfied because there has been no recent census and the Muslim population apparently has increased.

The Lebanese Students’ League also demands that the government legally recognize the Feddayeen (Arab commandos who harass Israel). Many Christians see them as Muslim extremists, and Islam’s holy-war doctrine is not far from the hearts of most Arab refugees. Such thinking is not geared to ingratiate the Christians. Even some Arab Christians see the Jewish return to Palestine as a fulfillment of prophecy. But some evangelicals have been among the student strikers favoring a free hand for the commandos.

Long-range results of the Beirut airport attack may be negative for both Israel and Lebanon. Israel has gained a new fighting front. And Lebanon’s non-neutral but non-warlike policy may have been given a fatal blow; strengthening of the military seems inevitable.

LILLIAN HARRIS DEAN

Bible: The Talk Of Yugoslavia

Communist Yugoslavia now boasts one of the world’s newest and most acclaimed Bible translations. It is the first Serbo-Croatian translation from the original languages, and is primarily the work of Roman Catholics, who drew on their Jerusalem Bible for language and style.

The translation has made such a deep literary impact on the nation that the Yugoslav Izbor (Reader’s Digest) carried a highly laudatory review—and this in a land that adheres to the Marxist interpretation of spiritual matters.

The Serbo-Croatian Bible distributed by the Bible societies for a century was translated from German. On the new text from original languages, Izbor reviewer Davor Shoshic enthusiastically wrote: “Our most outstanding biblicists, writers, translators, and linguists have combined their ingenuity to produce a work in which the dimensions of biblical terminology leave a person moved and amazed. You can read it in childhood, in youth, and in manhood. Every time you read it, it becomes new. This most-read and -translated book will never go begging.…”

Five translators undertook the task three years ago, assisted by twenty-three scholars and four editors. Most of the group, headed by national poet Jure Kastelan, are Catholics, though a few are unaffiliated.

The edition has no footnotes but adds a brief commentary at the end of each book. Controversial passages receive a modified interpretation, in contrast with the old dogmatic Catholic approach.

Unlike the New Testament, published in 1967, the full Bible carries no imprimatur. An evangelical authority believes Catholics deliberately wished to avoid limiting use of the translation to their own people, and this is what has happened. Evangelicals have received the work enthusiastically and hope eventually to get permission to print it in a cheaper form (the lowest-priced edition now costs $12), without the Apocrypha and footnotes. But they are not waiting for that to use the book.

Yugoslavia’s Catholics (concentrated in Croatia and its capital, Zagreb) have a healthy attitude toward evangelicals, and even seek out and use their literature. Elmer Klassen, an evangelical who offers free New Testaments through newspaper ads, is receiving open cooperation from Catholics. Recently, his office was working to fulfill 2,000 orders. Billy Graham’s brief Zagreb visit in 1967 helped break the ice and opened Catholic eyes to the responsibility to spread the Gospel.

Plans are being made for a holiday camp conducted by two well-known evangelicals, and the nation’s ninety-six Baptist congregations next month conclude their first extensive joint evangelistic campaign. THOMAS COSMADES

Watchman Nee, Witness Lee

Carefully castigating all Pentecostal excesses, Witness Lee, scholarly “apostle” of the new in China’s indigenous church, generates a frenzy all his own. He is dividing not only the tranquil waters of the faithful in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, but the hegemony established by imprisoned¹Nee sentenced to fifteen years, finished his term last April but still is allowed home only once or twice a month, and then not to sleep. He returns to his Shanghai incarceration, receiving a small salary for translating technical books into Chinese. Watchman Nee as well.

So avid are Lee’s followers that they cannot wait for their rebaptism, or “reburial.” Hundreds leap into the water, eager to experience what Lee proclaims as the reburial of everything “old,” including the old “self.” Their reward: a “release of the Spirit.”

Even founder Nee will have to follow the teaching of the self-proclaimed apostle or find himself “jobless,” Asia News Report quotes the ambitious Lee as saying in one of his more brazen pontifications.

But not all of the Little Flock Chinese jump when Lee speaks. His insistence that it is no longer necessary to pray in the name of Jesus—and that Christians must seek release from the bondage of the “letter” in Bible doctrines—is causing breakaways. When the Communists do finally release Nee, the Little Flock may have pretty well scattered, or else taken cover under the wing of a devourer.

Black Hatred At St. Paul’S

Amid loud interruptions and ugly scenes, punctuated by the strong-arm tactics of plain-clothes policemen, the ecumenical movement bulldozed its way to another dubious triumph last month when Cardinal Heenan tried to preach in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. The English Roman Catholic leader was frequently shouted down by Protestant demonstrators, and though remaining outwardly calm, was twice betrayed into unguarded remarks added to his script.

One of these, after sundry protesters had been rudely dispatched, was that these scenes showed how much the ecumenical movement was needed. It was the second, however, which was particularly unfortunate. After another spate of interruptions he suggested that Enoch Powell (the British politician regarded as being racist) might have a point after all. Though obscure, the allusion was resented by some.

This first appearance in St. Paul’s by a prince of the Roman church was in return for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s visit to Westminster Cathedral last year. There had been minor protests during the early part of the St. Paul’s service, but when Archbishop Ramsey welcomed the cardinal, pandemonium broke loose. “Your Eminence, dear brother in Christ …” was the signal for wild scenes as extreme Protestants flung unchurchly epithets at the red-garbed figure in the pulpit. For over three minutes the cardinal could not say a word, as a dozen or more Protestants, some with clerical collars (supporters of the Rev. Ian Paisley), were dragged to a side door. At least two of them were literally choked into silence by a squad of what turned out to be policemen and not, as one spectator thought, “bouncers hired from a Soho nightclub of ecumenical tendencies.”

The cardinal tried again and was continually interrupted while dispensing the usual ecumenical treacle. Manfully he kept at it in order to justify the neat, unbroken sentences dutifully reported in Britain’s “quality” press next day.

Meanwhile Paisley was outside, having arrived thirty-five minutes before the service began and settled down to exchanging his normal pleasantries with those who managed to get near him despite the police cordon. He emphasized that he does not hate Catholics, whom later that evening he delicately described as “blaspheming, cursing, spitting Roman scum.” He took no part in the church demonstrations.

“Remember the martyrs that shed their blood!” a lady demonstrator adjured a bowler-hatted city gent. “Which martyrs were these?” he asked politely. She moved to higher ground. “I’m on my way to heaven,” she announced. “Good for you, dear,” he said agreeably.

Interviewed by CHRISTIANITY TODAY, the general secretary of the National Secular Society said: “I am very saddened by tonight’s happenings.… I have seen … black hatred here tonight.” He had a point there—and he wasn’t just referring to the oranges, eggs, and tomatoes that Paisley was brushing off his bare head.

In his own Northern Ireland last month, Paisley and others were sentenced to three months in jail for an attack on a Catholic civil-rights march. Trying to clamp down on Protestant-Catholic strife, the government there has proposed laws against joining a demonstration banned by the government, or interfering with a government-approved demonstration.

J. D. DOUGLAS

The gospel is one thing and the fruits of the Gospel are something else. They are like the roots of a vine and the grapes that grow on it.

The Gospel, the “Good News,” is a message, the accepting of which produces new men with new ideals and ethics. The ideals and ethics proceeding from the Gospel are as impossible to achieve without it as are grapes without the root and vine.

Yet there is abroad today a feeling that society can be saved without the salvation of the individual. This idea is appealing because it presents man with something he can accomplish for himself and for the social order, without challenge to his personal beliefs or way of life.

The Gospel calls for the humiliation and subordination of self and the magnifying of Christ. It is a supernatural message about a supernatural person that brings about supernatural changes in the lives of those who accept it.

To a patient with diphtheria, the good news is that a cure—antitoxin—is available. When a house bursts into flame, it is good news that a fire brigade is on the way. When a car engine is sputtering, it is good news that a mechanic is available.

The Gospel is the best news of all, for it is the answer to man’s greatest need. It is the offer of clean hands and a pure heart for those who are defiled. It is the offer of the divine heart transplant, a new heart for the old. It promises a renewed mind, one that can grasp the things of the Spirit.

How wise we are if we face up to the depravity of the human heart! The Prophet Jeremiah says: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).

Our Lord enumerated the wretched fruits of the unregenerate heart: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts [the natural minds of men], murder [hate], adultery [lust], fornication [uncleanness], theft [covetousness], false witness [lying], slander [vindictiveness]. These are what defile a man” (Matt. 15:19, 20a).

The Apostle Paul also describes the miserable state of the unregenerate heart in his letter to the Galatians: “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dlssention, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:19–21).

Speaking in another letter as though he were talking to America in 1969, he says: “Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor hom*osexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9, 10).

Add to this dismal catalogue of the sins of the flesh the equally damning sins of pride, lovelessness, insensibility to the condition and needs of others—sins both of commission and of omission—and we find ourselves convicted in thought, word, and deed.

We all are guilty. Let’s not compound our guilt by ignoring or denying the divine diagnosis. The Bible tells us, “For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:22b, 23), and, “Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” (Rom. 5:12).

This, then, is the miserable state of the natural man. If we are honest with ourselves we must admit it. I know that this was the state of my own heart and life until I accepted in faith the One who changed the entire situation for this life and for eternity. The change came when I believed God’s diagnosis and accepted his cure; and the message that told me what God offered was the Gospel.

I have seen a patient indignantly reject the diagnosis of cancer, only to die miserably a few months later. Similarly, otherwise intelligent people refuse to admit God’s diagnosis of sin in their lives, and through that refusal ultimately reap the certain end.

There is a growing awareness of the increased danger of cancer for cigarette smokers. The Surgeon General’s office has issued a number of warnings, and now on radio and TV we hear that “it’s a case of life, or breath.”

What about another warning: “For the wages of sin is death”? But an alternative is given along with the warning: “The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). That is the Gospel!

What miserable substitutes for the Gospel are being offered to hopeless sinners today! They are to be found in the teachings of cults; in vapid ethical homilies; in the words and activities of those who regard social revolution as the Gospel; in the sermons of those who deny the content of the Gospel itself.

The Gospel is God’s Good News that there is an escape from the effects of sin and its certain judgment. It is the message that the miserable wretch on skid row and the sophisticated matron in the social register are alike sinners in God’s sight, with the same disease and needing the same cure. Both are offered. It tells of a restored fellowship that is sweet beyond words.

Little wonder that the Gospel is called the Good News. It is the best news in all the world, and for those who hear and believe, this news lasts for all eternity.

While the sins that plague mankind and are the cause of most newspaper headlines today are the fruit of the wickedness of the human heart, there is another kind of fruit that is found only in the lives of men and women who, by faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, have been changed (converted, born again). This fruit is beautiful to behold and comforting to experience. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:22–24). These things are the fruits of the Gospel!

How tragic to replace this marvelous message of hope with futile exhortations to men to lift themselves and the social order of which they are a part by some form of boot-strap endeavor! To the Church, and to individual Christians, there has been committed the preaching, teaching, and living of the gospel message.

If we give the Gospel top priority, it will change things. There is no other way to bring results that last.

L. NELSON BELL

Our Father and our God, thou hast said, “Blessed is that nation whose God is the Lord.” We recognize on this historic occasion that we are a nation under God. We thank thee for this torch of faith handed to us by our forefathers. May we never let it be extinguished. Thou alone hast given us our prosperity, our freedom, and our power. This faith in God is our heritage and our foundation!

Thou hast warned us in the Scriptures, “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” As George Washington reminded us in his farewell address, morality and faith are the pillars of our society. We confess these pillars are being eroded in an increasingly materialistic and permissive society. The whole world is watching to see if the faith of our fathers will stand the trials and tests of the hour. Too long we have neglected thy word and ignored thy laws. Too long we have tried to solve our problems without reference to thee. Too long we have tried to live by bread alone. We have sown to the wind and are now reaping a whirlwind of crime, division, and rebellion.

And now with the wages of our sins staring us in the face, we remember thy words, “If people, who are called by my Name shall humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

Help us this day to turn from our sins and to turn by simple faith to the One who said, “Ye must be born again.”

So we pray, O God, as we enter a new era, that we as a nation may experience a moral and spiritual restoration.

Thou hast said, “Promotion comes not from the east nor from the west, but from thee.” We acknowledge thy divine help in the selection of our leadership each four years. We recognize, O Lord, that in thy sovereignty thou has permitted Richard Nixon to lead us at this momentous hour of history.

We beseech thee that he will have thy divine guidance and power daily. Help him as thou didst help thy servants of old. Our Father, we know his burdens and responsibilities will be overwhelming. He will hold in his hands the destiny of more people than any man in history. O God, our new President needs thee as no man ever needed thee in leading a people! There will be times when he will be overwhelmed by the problems at home and abroad that have been building up to the breaking point for many years. Protect him from physical danger. And in the lonely moments of decision grant him an uncompromising courage to do what is morally right. Give him a cool head and a warm heart. Give him a compassion for those in physical, moral, and spiritual need. We pray that thou wilt so guide Richard Nixon in handling the affairs of state that the whole world will marvel and glorify thee.

O God, we consecrate Richard Milhous Nixon to the Presidency of these United States with the assurance that from this hour on, as he and his family move into the White House, they will have the presence and the power of thy Son, who said, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.”

What we pray for President Nixon we pray for Vice-President Agnew and members of the Cabinet. May they be given a wisdom and a courage that is beyond their own. Bless them as a team to lead America to the dawning of a new day with renewed trust in God that will lead to peace, justice, and prosperity.

We pray this humbly in the name of the Prince of Peace, who shed his blood on the Cross that men might have eternal life. Amen.

Evangelist

Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed tuo Nomine da gloriam. Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name we give the glory.

Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy Name.

In this festive hour when the sun in her iridescent splendor will soon begin to take her daily trek, finally coming to rest in the bosom of the western horizon; while nature by pantomime and silent eloquence proclaims thy majesty, dominion, and power in heaven and earth; in this grandiloquent silence we lift our voices to thee in praise and adoration.

In these troubled times of global turmoil and unrest, our Father, we turn to thee. Grant to our nation a clear vision of her highest good, and to our leaders a clear judgment as to how that good may be attained.

And at this time we would humbly beseech thee to bestow a special blessing upon our beloved President Richard Milhous Nixon and his family.

We thank thee for his exemplary life, for his unswerving allegiance, fidelity, and devotion to America and the ideals for which she stands—freedom, justice, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We thank thee for his unstinted services to this nation in yesteryears. Be his bastion of strength and comfort as he assumes the awesome and herculean responsibilities of the Presidency and the concomitant responsibilities as the leader of the free nations.

Endow him with spiritual wisdom to make the right decisions that may well determine the fate of mankind and of civilization itself.

God of grace and God of glory, on thy servants pour thy power. Give us wisdom, give us courage for the facing of this hour. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget. And this we pray in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

—THE RT. REV. CHARLES EWBANK TUCKER

Campus unrest may become a major national problem. One school after another has experienced turmoil, disruption, violence, and even death. The president of Swarthmore College died of a heart attack probably precipitated by the seizure of college buildings and the demands of recalcitrant students and non-students whose ulterior goal appeared to be the nihilistic destruction of existing forms, with the chaos that would surely ensue.

As the patterns of revolt take form, certain conclusions may be drawn. First and foremost, it seems clear that the student war is being fought by a small minority of irrational revolutionists who have no intrinsic interest in securing an education and are determined to destroy the educational processes. Supported by a few faculty members, they have formed a more or less cohesive organizational pattern for large-scale assaults. They neither profess nor act on Christian principles.

A second conclusion is equally obvious. If presidents and deans, confronted with excessive demands—and perhaps even imprisoned in their offices—make concessions to these radicals, they set a pattern that virtually guarantees academic anarchy for a long time to come. Other minorities will quickly learn from this experience, and will besiege the same presidents and deans to meet their special demands. If black power can force institutions to make concessions, why can’t Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Italians, Jews, and others do the same? Why can’t Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians seek to force universities to establish departments of religion that will reflect their special views? Once the principle of yielding to minority groups has been established, there is nothing in principle to prevent other groups from exerting similar pressures. If concessions are granted to one group, is there any valid reason for refusing to honor the demands of other groups? This can produce nothing but institutional decadence and make campus a battleground for small enclaves of special interests.

It is apparent, moreover, that minorities can and do prevent the majority from securing its goals and fulfilling its objectives. A firmly established principle of constitutional government is that the majority cannot take away or suppress the legitimate rights of minorities; many of our laws were written to prevent this. It follows that no minority group ought to infringe the basic rights of the majority, either. Yet this is exactly what is happening in academia today. Vast numbers of students who have paid a great deal of money for their education are being deprived of their rights and robbed of their investment. Administrators who think and operate in a rational framework and rely on persuasion are particularly unfitted to handle revolutionaries. If they panic under pressure and make commitments that either will later be revoked or cannot be fulfilled, this will only lead to even uglier confrontations.

There is reason to think that perhaps the federal government has contributed to the problem by channeling into educational institutions vast sums of money that have been used to turn these institutions from a strictly educational role to one of promoting social change. Campuses have become centers of sociological ferment. They have been moving beyond the task of examining the forms, institutions, and functions of human groups to that of determining what those forms, institutions, and functions should be, and then trying to force people into patterns considered desirable. It almost seems that many a campus has ceased to be an arena for the rational examination of competitive views and instead tends to promote a particular view that has hardened into a cultic conviction—and is backed by a passion to impose that conviction on society in general.

Radical campus rebels must be regarded as a threat not only to the educational system but also to political and social structures, for if they succeed on campus, they will no doubt try to repeat their performance elsewhere.

The time has come for colleges and universities to band together in adopting common principles of action to prevent student disruptions, and in laying down clear prohibitions so that if demonstrations and seizures do occur, the students involved will know they stand to gain not concessions but prompt expulsion. Administrators should make sure, however, that channels are open for the expression of legitimate grievances, and they should remain ready to remedy these.

The desire to improve society is good. But it is not enough. More than anything else the student dissidents need the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Evangelicals have often been criticized for their emphasis on the preaching of the Gospel, and have been reminded that changed men do not always change society and that unchanged men often do. Still they claim that when unregenerated men uncommitted to Christian principles work to change society, the new structure they attempt to erect has a weak foundation that will not endure. But men who have come to know God, the Source of all good, who are committed to Christian principles and are working for the betterment of society—such men can be the agents of lasting change.

Hatred Abuilding

Prejudice is approaching its worst when it leads to the malicious destruction of places of worship and education. This is what again is happening to the Jew. In what may be yet another wave of anti-Semitism, synagogues and schools in New York and Washington were hit by fires and explosions last month.

The smoldering Arab-Israeli struggle may be contributing to the latest tensions. But a more immediate focal point is the New York school dispute, in which Jews and Negroes have been the two most identifiable ethnic groups. The blacks there complain that the Jews control the school system and systematically exclude black teachers from job placement.

To some extent the urban riots of the last several years have had Jews as a target. Some Jewish-owned businesses in Negro ghettos were singled out for attack by looters and arsonists. The proprietors were accused of taking advantage of consumers with high prices and interest rates. Their reply was that ghetto operating costs are higher because of pilferage and poor repayment in credit sales.

Throughout history the Jews have been subjected to persecution as perhaps no other group has. They have often served as scapegoats in times of social upheaval But they have miraculously survived and despite their small numbers are making their influence felt more and more. Even apart from biblical prophecies, it is hard to escape the conclusion that God has had a special hand upon the Jews, and that in some sense at least they continue to be his special people.

For Christians—whether black or white—to share in the anti-Semitic mood is particularly repugnant. We regret that so few Jews have accorded Jesus Christ a place in their hearts, but it is never his will to retaliate—in thought or in deed. Evangelicals have a special responsibility to counter anti-Semitic trends and to place themselves firmly on the side of racial understanding and accord.

The Czech Quest For Freedom

The Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia has neither extinguished the Czech desire for liberty nor produced the abject capitulation the invaders hoped for. The self-immolation of Jan Palach in protest against the military rape of his country speaks dramatically of the depth of his feeling and that of his fellow countrymen.

In the reaction to the Czech plight, three areas of loud silence are notable. The first is that of the so-called liberal establishment in the United States. Their spokesmen were exceedingly vocal in support of Fidel Castro before his seizure of power and viewed him a simple agrarian reformer. Sukarno of Indonesia, who played the Communist game, was their hero. The House Committee on Un-American Activities has been their bete noire. United States support of South Viet Nam has called forth their wrath, expressed in both word and deed. But the Czech invasion has been met by stony silence. Why?

Second is the equally strange silence of some of Czechoslovakia’s leading Protestant churchmen. Strong supporters of Russian-brand Communism, they have had ample time to observe its determination to preserve the Stalinist status quo against progressive Czech thought. Their silence while some of their countrymen make great sacrifices in behalf of human dignity and freedom is shameful. We wait for some repudiation of Soviet reactionary conservatism, some call for freedom of speech and liberty of persons and country.

The third unusually soft-spoken group is the World Council of Churches. At Uppsala last summer General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake made it known that the Viet Nam resolution, virtually a condemnation of the United States, was to be taken immediately to the highest American authorities, even though the WCC is supposed to speak to the churches and not for them. In regard to Czechoslovakia, the WCC now has the duty and obligation to speak just as clearly and to work with equal urgency. If it does not, everyone has the right to ask why it operates selectively—and seemingly in favor of the Soviet Union.

Clearing A Political Slum

That the sons of Erin have long memories was seen again recently in a British court of law. Charged with setting fire to a Protestant church hall in Manchester an Irishman said he did it because “the redcoats of England set fire to Father Murphy’s church in 1798.” Evidently this mitigating circ*mstance moved the judge to let him off with a $72 fine.

Many Irishmen are in similar bondage to the past, whether they live in the twenty-six counties that make up the republic or in the six counties of the British north; whether they are Catholic or Protestant; whether they march with the civil-righters or the outlawed Irish Republican Army or respond to the stentorian summons of the Rev. Ian Paisley (see “Ireland: A Shabby Victory,” News, November 8, 1968).

Paisley, who served a three-month jail term in 1966, is among thirty-five defendants now facing charges of unlawful assembly. The charges followed incredible scenes last November when the center of the ancient cathedral city of Armagh in Northern Ireland was invaded and controlled by militant Protestants brought in by Paisley. Armed with staves, Paisley and his men successfully contrived to thwart a legally sanctioned civil-rights march. The police on duty (part of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which reportedly is made up of 2,742 Protestants and only 311 Catholics) seemed powerless in the face of Protestant thuggery.

This was but one of a number of recent incidents that have brought the threat of civil war to Ulster (Northern Ireland) and confirmed one writer’s description of it as “John Bull’s political slum.” This province which is scarcely bigger than Connecticut, has a higher church-attendance rate than England or Scotland. This is a salient feature in a situation in which any attempt to separate religion and politics will mislead and confuse. The thirty-six Unionist (Conservative) members of the province’s legislative assembly are Protestant, the nine Nationalists Catholic. The Protestant-Catholic ratio in the province as a whole is two to one.

The present state of troubles has involved accusations of Chicago-type brutality by police against the civil-righters; the dismissal of the Minister for Home Affairs; and counter-charges by Paisley that the cause of civil rights is being used as a cloak for Communist and Papist propaganda (he does not specify a conspiracy between the two). There is no doubt that left-wingers have jumped on a perfectly sound bandwagon, but this does not make their cause one whit less just. Catholics in some areas of Ulster are discriminated against, a fact admitted by some Protestants and boasted about by others. “We are the white Negroes of Derry,” said one Catholic.

The Northern Ireland cabinet last month agreed to establish an independent inquiry on the affairs of the province. The unprecedented possibility of bringing in an English judge to conduct it shows that at last Premier Terence O’Neill is in earnest about implementing reforms. He will need the prayers of Christian people, for his most vociferous and intimidating adversaries are Protestant advocates of the unholy war. Meanwhile, it is earnestly to be hoped that civil-righters will do nothing to exacerbate the situation. If reform is not coming as quickly as they might wish, it is a matter for real rejoicing (to those who know and care for Ulster) that it is coming at all.

The Savannah Case

The United States Supreme Court has overruled a Georgia decision that allowed two Southern Presbyterian churches to leave the denomination in protest of doctrinal deviation, yet keep the property. On First Amendment grounds, everyone can understand why the court does not wish to resolve doctrinal disputes, since “the hazards are ever present of inhibiting the free development of religious doctrine.”

Although the Savannah congregations may yet have other avenues open to them, the Supreme Court ruling may discourage evangelicals concerned with preserving theological integrity. Strangely, the decision may increase support for merger with the Reformed Church in America, on which Southern Presbyterians are now voting, because the merger plan has an escape clause under which local congregations can leave the merged church with their property after a one-year trial period. A better approach was recently made by the United Methodist Church and EUB churches that felt they could not join the merger: both sides yielded on original demands and made a financial settlement without resorting to the secular courts.

The Greatest Of These …

Love is a many-splendored thing, asserts the song, and on Valentine’s Day it seems to be true. Rows of satin-covered, bow-trimmed, heart-shaped boxes of candy line counters. Dozens of long-stemmed red roses promising to snare the wariest Valentine grace florists’ windows. Jewelers, furriers, and photographers propose their wares as a better way to say “I love you.” And for faltering tongues, greeting cards will speak the magic words humorously, sweetly, nonchalantly, sentimentally, or lovingly.

In the spring, the saying goes, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love—perhaps because he was primed by Valentine’s Day. To be genuine, his love—and that of his Valentine—must spring from the most splendid Love of all, who gave the greatest gift of all.

Roman Catholicism At Bay

Pope Paul is beginning to sound defensive as he attempts to maintain the integrity of his church. Whether he can survive the present assaults and retain the historic views and structures remains to be seen.

In a recent statement the Pope spoke of those who seek to change the church in the “form and spirit of the Protestant Reformation.” Here he is making a serious analytical mistake. No doubt he thinks that the cry for Christian freedom and liberty of conscience is the root of the trouble, and he is right. But the context is quite different from that of the Reformation.

The Reformers sought freedom from an authority by accretion within the church. But they did not seek unlimited or unregulated liberty of conscience. Their goal was freedom under the authority of Scripture—freedom under bondage to the Word of God. Luther said he would change his mind on any doctrine if he could be shown that another view was Scriptural. The loudest Roman Catholic voices today want freedom from Scripture as well as from tradition and papal authority.

Ostensibly the issues at stake are matters like birth control. But among the Dutch, who indeed have raised the question of birth control, the extent of the protest is clarified by their new catechism. Some of the positions in this document, which has been under attack by the Vatican, are contrary not only to the teachings of the hierarchy but also to the teachings of Scripture. The crucial issue is biblical as well as ecclesiastical.

If Pope Paul does not act soon, he will lose by default. But if he moves vigorously and tries to stamp out dissent, he may bring on a revolution he cannot control, a war he cannot win. His recent speeches suggest that he is ready to risk all to defend historic Roman Catholicism. The outcome of his struggle with the Dutch may well be the turning point.

The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, edited by James M. Robinson (John Knox, 380 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by David Scaer, assistant professor of systematic theology, Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois.

Dialectic theology has been with the theological world long enough to have found the level of its own orthodoxy. It is the task of the third generation to appreciate the contributions of the forefathers, who had to fight for their right to exist. This anthology is an attempt to acquaint the theological world of today with its immediate progenitors, who have helped frame the form and content of contemporary theology. Collected here are essays and portions of books of the early dialecticians from in and around the third decade of this century. Along with the earlier writings of Barth, there are also contributions by Tillich, Gogarten, and Bultmann, among others. The editor, James M. Robinson, as a rule chose writings not previously available in English, and he arranged the material according to time of original publication.

The reader gains the impression that he is looking at a family tree. The trunk is Barth, whose prefaces to three editions of his commentary on Romans started a chain reaction of critique and counter-critique, of attack and defense, between him and the German theologians. In some places the tree was pruned; in others the branches grew to a wider girth than the original trunk. The essays chosen to show the reaction to Barth’s three prefaces are so salty and blunt as to suggest an extremely sticky situation in theology during the twenties.

The several open letters between Barth and the great liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack open a little-known avenue of Christian thought. Von Harnack hit the jugular vein of Barth’s dialectic theology when he saw in it “an invisible point between absolute religious skepticism and naïve biblicism.”

In describing the beginnings of dialectic theology, the editor lets the reader choose for himself who is the fairest dialectic theologian of all. Is it Brunner? Bultmann? Tillich? Or perhaps Gogarten? Barth is not the true Barthian—simply because it is impossible to give an exacting definition of Barthianism. Robinson, who has built his work on earlier work in German by the now famous Jürgen Moltmann, puts the reader on the sidelines of a theological tennis match. Or perhaps the situation is more like a handball game, where if a player is not alert he can get hit in the head.

This anthology helps us to gain historical perspective on a movement that is still pulling much of theology into its grip, and to understand the evolution of today’s theology.

How To Be ‘For Real’

Release from Phoniness, by Arnold Prater (Word, 1968, 123 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Stephen Smallman, pastor, McLean Presbyterian Church, McLean, Virginia.

“God is not a giant IBM card who comes sliding out of some colossal computer when you have pressed all the right buttons. But you can find Him. You can be for real.” This is the beginning of an informal and personal conversation with the author (a district superintendent in the United Methodist Church) about leaving behind the phony life. The book is for desperate people, desperate because behind their mask and “novacaine smiles” they know there is nothing, and they want to find something real. And so, for those who will listen, Prater procedes to show that phoniness is nothing but the besetting sin of all men: self-worship. Actually, however, men worship only their self-image, their mask. If they would ever be honest enough to look behind the mask, they would be appalled. “Release from phoniness” necessitates taking off that mask, confronting one’s self honestly (an agonizing ordeal, the author warns), and then confronting God in Jesus Christ. And like the father of the prodigal son, God will gladly accept those who come to him—without their masks.

In the second half of the book, Prater discusses life without the mask. A new person in Christ no longer needs to be phony, but that is the beginning of the story, not the end; he now “puts on his skin.” This is no easier than “taking off the mask,” but God is now within, providing proper motivation. The real thing begins, as might be expected, with complete honesty and sincere compassion for others. (“Involvement in the despair of others—this is the essence of love.”) The Church, for better or worse, is Christ’s Church, and Christians belong there. (“If there are phonies in the church, then they will need you.”) The “maskless way” is no easy way, but it is the real way, leading to a life of purpose and content.

This very readable book will be a great help to those seeking release. It should be made clear, however, that apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, men have no desire to seek. Prater may be implying this by writing only to those who are desperate, but his insistence on true repentance might be strengthened if he were to tell the seeker that it is God who is revealing to him his desperate condition. Jesus is the author as well as the finisher of our faith. (Prater left out “the author” when he quoted this verse.)

The most provocative thought in the book, in my opinion, is the basic thesis that when a man meets Jesus Christ, he is released from phoniness. Surely this provides a strong clue to the cause of phoniness in the Church.

Antidote To Individualism

The Believers’ Church, by Donald F. Durnbaugh (Macmillan, 1968, 315 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Bruce L. Shelley, professor of church history, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

In June, 1967, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville hosted one hundred and fifty church historians, denominational leaders, and theologians in a Conference on the Concept of the Believers’ Church. During the conference it became apparent that considerable confusion surrounded this concept. Now, thanks to Donald Durnbaugh’s book, misunderstanding need no longer reign.

For about two decades now, a number of scholars interested in Mennonite, Baptist, Quaker, and Brethren beginnings have been chipping away at the past like sculptors, attempting to fashion an image of a rather distinctive type of Christianity. Working from the rough outline left by this host of craftsmen, Durnbaugh traces in detail the shape of the Believers’ Church. It is now clearly distinguishable from the other major Christian bodies: Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed.

The Believers’ Church has often been called the “Free Church.” Given, however, the increasing acceptance of separation of church and state in modern times, “Free Church” is now so inclusive as to be all but useless. Believers’ Church stands for something far more positive than the mere “wall of separation.” As Max Weber originally pointed out, it stands for a “community of personal believers of the reborn, and only these.”

Durnbaugh, who teaches church history at Bethany Theological Seminary, a Church of the Brethren School, lists seven features of the Believers’ Church: voluntary membership, separation from the world, a high level of Christian life, discipline, mutual aid, church forms evolved from the group, and the authority of the Word and Spirit.

From these characteristics it should be apparent that the Believers’ Church is not simply a cluster of denominations. Baptists, for example, who began with Believers’ Church ideals, have compromised them seriously under the heady wine of revivalistic success. Durnbaugh rightly argues that “Believers’ Church” refers to basic theological concepts. He traces these back to the Waldenses and the Unity of the Brethren; from them to the Radical Reformers, Baptists, Quakers, Church of the Brethren, Methodists, Disciples, and Plymouth Brethren; and then to the Confessing Church of Germany, the East Harlem Protestant Parish, and the Church of the Savior in Washington, D. C.

Evangelicals ought to wrestle with the ideas in this book for two supreme reasons. First, the concept of the Believers’ Church is a welcome antidote to an unbiblical individualism that has infected American evangelism. Many evangelists are inclined to think of the Believers’ Church as the Believer’s Church. But the place of the apostrophe is all important. The difference is between an unhealthy individualism and a responsible churchmanship.

Second, the Believers’ Church may provide evangelicals with the best possible adjustment to an increasingly secular age. As the symbols of a “Christian America” fade away or are smashed by militant secularists, evangelical dreams of the Kingdom in America may either turn to nightmares of disillusionment or find fulfillment in a new humanity in Christ. That new humanity, the Believers’ Church reveals, is what the Gospel is all about.

Profile Of Teen-Acers

Christian Youth: An In-Depth Study, by Roy B. Zuck and Gene A. Getz (Moody, 1968, 192 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Charles G. Schauffele, professor of Christian Education, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Gloomy generalities can now be dispersed with the facts. “A majority of the Christian youths surveyed were satisfied with their home situations.” At the same time they felt a lack of willingness to discuss spiritual matters, and there was too little opportunity at home for relaxing fun.

Educators in nearly 200 evangelical churches asked almost 3,000 teen-agers 336 well-honed questions about school, church, parents, preachers, dating, TV, sex, money, and marriage. Using valid research procedures and statistical correlation, Drs. Zuck and Getz have given a concentrated and compact package of reliable information that will be useful for several years to come. No parent or teacher, no one who works with teen-agers, can afford to pass up this data.

The study shows that teen-agers think their friends influence them more than their parents. So do their parents. More than half of those interviewed watch TV at least two hours a day, and some much more. Most of the churches and parents represented have told them not to attend a movie theater for so much as a Walt Disney film, but have given no guidance or ground rules for the choice of late late TV shows.

Those interviewed came from more than forty evangelical denominations, from every section of the United States, and from the whole spectrum of socio-economic levels. More than 12 per cent of them were interested in church vocations. Two-thirds had no serious doubts about the sixteen doctrines listed in the questionnaire. They were, rather, more concerned over the lost condition of the heathen and the problem of evil in the world. The chapter on ethics and morality ought to give youth leaders strong doubts about present programs and start them on the road to serious revisions.

For those who may be curious about the instruments and procedures, the authors thoroughly describe every step in their survey and show samples of their materials. Their project, which was encouraged and supported by the Research Commission and the Youth Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals, ought to take a lot of guesswork out of evangelical youth work.

Book Briefs

The Gospel in Isaiah, by Gilbert Guffin (Convention Press, 1968, 148 pp., $.95). Prepared as the Bible study guide for the Southern Baptist Convention in 1969, this fresh approach to Isaiah serves as a fitting preparation for the Crusade of the Americas being launched this year by most Baptist conventions in North, Central, and South America.

The Stork Is Dead, by Charlie W. Shedd (Word, 1968, 127 pp., $3.95). The author of Letters to Karen and Letters to Philip comes through again! This volume fills a longstanding need for a forceful, frank treatment of sex directed to teen-agers in language they can understand and believe. The views presented are sound—biblically, ethically, and practically.

Finney’s Lectures on Theology, by Charles Grandison Finney (Bethany, 1968, 248 pp., $3.95). Reprint of a classic first published in 1840.

Virginia Woolf Meets Charlie Brown, by David H. C. Read (Eerdmans, 1968, 225 pp., $4.95). A collection of timely sermons by the popular minister of New York City’s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Short Dictionary of Bible Personal Names, by H. H. Rowley (Basic Books, 1968, 168 pp., $4.50). A compact dictionary that includes every person mentioned in the Bible and Apocrypha with a concise summary of the biographical information available. A companion volume, Short Dictionary of BibleThemes (114 pp., $3.95), summarizes, objectively and concisely, biblical teaching on major themes. Each bit of information in both volumes is accompanied by a biblical reference.

All the Holy Days and Holidays, by Herbert Lockyer (Zondervan, 1968, 288 pp., $4.95). A collection of sermonic and source material for use on special days of the church year, national holidays, and a variety of other occasions.

The Douglass Sunday School Lessons, 1969, by Earl L. Douglass (Word, 1968, 391 pp., $3.50). The newest edition of an extensive evangelical commentary on the International Sunday School Lessons.

Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, by John Mc-Clintock and James Strong (Baker, 1968, 940 pp., $12.95). Reprint of a standard reference work. Writing from an evangelical perspective, the contributors offer a wealth of information on hundreds of important topics in the field of religion. This is the first of a set of twelve volumes scheduled for completion in June, 1971.

Hebrews: The Epistle of Warning, by John Owen (Kregel, 1968, 283 pp., $3.95). Reprint of a seventeenth-century work by the renowned Puritan theologian. A valuable addition to the minister’s library.

Holy Book and Holy Tradition, ed. by F. F. Bruce and E. G. Rupp (Eerdmans, 1968, 244 pp., $5.95). Papers presented at an International Colloquium held in the Faculty of Theology of Manchester University, England. Considers the interplay of sacred writing, oral tradition, and religious art from the earliest of times to our own.

Plain Talk on John, by Manford Gutzke (Zondervan, 1968, 213 pp., $3.95). A welcome addition to the “Plain Talk” books by this gifted Bible expositor.

Demon Possession, by John L. Nevius (Kregel, 1968, 364 pp., $4.95). Reprint of a work first published in 1894. Investigates the whole question of demon possession by examining biblical teaching and by citing numerous case histories. The author was a Presbyterian missionary in China for nearly forty years.

The Bible Digest, by C. W. Slemming (Kregel, 1968, 905 pp., $9.95). An informative and enriching survey of each book of the Bible presented from an evangelical point of view. First American edition of a work published in England in 1960.

Who Told You It Was Round?

“Everyone’s gone to the moon,” lamented a pop song that the radio intruded into my household last week. I showed respectful interest, only to be rebuked for not spotting an oldie resuscitated in deference to the adult world’s current craze. The latter gave Mr. Nixon a few nifty thoughts for his inaugural address, clobbered a certain durable notion about green cheese, provided a new slogan for Protestant extremists anxious to “keep the Pope off the moon” (are they sure that’s what they really want?), and allowed a New Scientist editorial to thunder: “Is it altogether dignified to strut about in a technological Versailles while the vast hordes of the world’s deprived could make such vital use of all these brains and dollars?” Forgetting biblical rejoinders, I was taken in for a moment by that tirade till it struck me (and I owe the thought to Mae West) that dignity has nothing to do with it.

Impervious to such larger lunacies, however, is Samuel Shenton, the rightful recipient of communications addressed “Flat Earth, Dover, England.” According to information received, his reaction to Apollo was markedly chilly. Mr. Shenton, sixty-five and a retired signwriter (something symbolic there?), is secretary of the International Flat Earth Society. With typical English understatement he defines his ministry as “putting up a little squeak” at the way the cosmos has been conned.

You ask how. Mr. Shenton will tell you. The earth is flat like a plate. A compass (ha! thought you had him?) gives only the illusion of a true course—misguided mariners are really following the circumference of the plate. There is no space. Astronautical pictures? Faked or distorted. And let him tell us another thing: The earth is not merely flat, it is stationary. Obscurely Mr. Shenton appears to take comfort in some innocuous words of one W. L. Cook of NASA who is quoted as having opined that the flat-earthers’ views “are in fact quite universally felt, if seldom expressed.” Among Mr. Shenton’s weightier sources are biblical references, notably First Samuel 2:8b: “For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.”

Quizzed once by a reporter about his proselytizing record, Mr. Shenton manfully confessed he had never converted anyone. But, he added hopefully, “there’s my wife. She’s coming round.” Bizarre that last word may be, but Brother Shenton exudes that saintly-perseverance which positively thrives on a cause accounted lost by a flatly perverse world.

What The Doctor Ordered

The doctor’s prescription really works! “Physician to Pastor: Golf Isn’t Enough” (Jan. 17) was exactly right according to my experience.

It became a matter of conscience to me that as an overweight minister I was hurting my influence as well as my health.…

A minister has many gastronomical pitfalls. The traditional chicken dinners, over-solicitous cooks, plus all of the sedentary conditions make him a perfect target for obesity. But here is an opportunity for the practice of preaching about temperance. Some of us have been addicted to food in a fashion similar to the hold that drink has upon its victims.

Bethel College

Mishawaka, Ind.

President

Can I believe my eyes? Do I read correctly that Dr. Dennison is suggesting that the “clergy” abstain from smoking and drinking?

I have been in church attendance for thirty years, from the New England states to Florida, and have never once sat under a pastor who had any need for nicotine or alcohol.

Or is it that I have always sought out a “born-again pastor” when looking for a church home and thus have missed the “clergy”-type of person who do have to be warned about such things? These clerics need a good salvation message, not a doctor’s advice.

Broomall, Pa.

No doubt many will call your attention to the omission of “at ease” in the Amos quotation. That phrase was, no doubt, the purpose of the quotation.

Arnold Lutheran Church

Duluth, Minn.

Right Relations

As with many good insights, Leon Morris’s reconciliation article (Jan. 17) tends to be a little lopsided in correcting current impressions of the importance of reconciliation.

True: God’s initiative is most important. True: reconciliation is inherent in salvation.

But many psychologists and psychiatrists would probably say that often man is worried by the fact that he has done wrong.… Often these guilt burdens are heightened by our social or human relationships. Relationships should help us find release from guilt in God’s forgiveness in Christ.

Jesus himself recognizes this human dimension of the problem when he tells his listeners that if on the way to the altar they remember that someone has something against them, they should put down their sacrifice and go to be reconciled to their brother. Then they return to complete their obligation to God. He seems to say that faulty human relationships can in fact close the door to God.

Elkhart, Ind.

Wesley’S Worry

I read with interest your editorial on “The Church’s Mission” (Jan. 17), regarding social activists vs. evangelicals.

Lecky, the historian, is quoted on the Wesleyan revival’s saving England from oblivion. We certainly should not forget Wesley’s Gospel of reconciling man to God. However, let us neither forget his witness of social action. Wesley did not only worry about men’s souls. He instituted clinics and credit unions, worked with Wilberforce to abolish slavery, and so on.

The evangelicals of today can no more place an exclusive claim on Wesley than the social activists, who are so subtly derided in your editorial. If Wesley was anything, he was a “social-evangelical.” And incidentally, that places him between the two polarities that some of us are so insidiously widening—including CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The First Methodist Church

Palmer, Tex.

Love And Foreign Policy

I would like to take issue with your editorial, “A Church in Politics” (Jan. 17).

Whether “influencing foreign policy” is evangelism or not doesn’t seem to be the issue. But influencing foreign policy seems to me to be a quite legitimate realm for the Church to work in; indeed it seems almost an obligation.…

Saint Augustine said that “love calls us to the things of this world.” Does not our love for our fellow men in any part of the world demand that we speak out against our government’s policies if we feel they are morally unjust? If our government is representing us as a nation when it acts, it is also representing the Christian element in society. Don’t we want it then to do the right thing? It is time for Christians to make their voices heard if they truly love their neighbors as themselves.

Madison, Wis.

You criticize the United Methodist Church for “influencing foreign policy” by its position on the Viet Nam war. On page 37 you carry a favorable notice of Billy Graham, whose religious views and pronouncements also “influence foreign policy,” indeed help to implement it.

Apparently opposition to the war by a church is unchristian “meddling in politics.” However, support of the war by a churchman appears to be all right under the aegis of “evangelism.”

Many people, in the church and out, feel that the United Methodist Church is nearer to the mind and spirit of the Prince of Peace in its “evangelism” than is Graham with his “evangelism.”

Harrisonburg, Va.

A Course Finished

Whenever a dear friend dies, we at once write to his family expressing our sympathy. Dr. Kenneth Latourette, a dear friend of mine, has died, and I want to write to his family, but he never had a wife and children. His family was his multitude of friends, many of whom no doubt read CHRISTIANITY TODAY. SO I feel I must write this letter to you.…

I first met Ken Latourette in 1916 when I … visited Denison College in Ohio.… [He] had been a missionary in China and his health had failed, and so he had to return to America and was teaching in Denison, and acting as faculty advisor to the YMCA. His health failed—and in the fifty years that followed he wrote more church history than any other living man!

Once I asked Ken how on earth he was able to do all this difficult and scholarly writing, in addition to teaching and serving on countless boards and committees and delivering numerous addresses. He replied that since he had no family he had devoted to his writing the time that most men gave to their families. I am sure this was not the full explanation of his amazing literary productivity.…

Dr. Latourette kept to the end of his life the enthusiasm of the early leaders of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, of which he had once been a secretary. He rejoiced in the growth of the missionary conventions of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.…

Kenneth Latourette has finished his course. Now let us press on with the Evangelization of the World in This Generation!

Philadelphia, Pa.

The Depressing Truth

Thank you very much for the article “Missouri Compromise” (Current Religious Thought, Jan. 17). [It] is depressing yet true.…

There will be those who will be unhappy because of his article. They might suggest that he should not make public a family affair. They might even suggest that he has too recently become a part of that family to truly understand and know it. Far worse than making public this family affair are those within the family who are destroying it with their neo-orthodoxy and lack of discipline. Far from being an unwelcome novice in the Missouri Synod, Dr. Montgomery is looked upon by many as God’s answer to their fervent prayers for the restoration of a pure Lutheran confession. We gladly call him brother and teacher.

St. Paul’s Ev. Lutheran Church

Brookfield, Ill.

John Warwick Montgomery has declared that I, among others, have written in such a way as to contribute to the “downgrading of the Bible.” He accuses a number of people, including myself, of undermining the principle that “God’s Word is and should remain the only standard and rule.…” As evidence he quotes a single line. Here are a few other lines from the same essay to which he refers (Lutheran Forum, October 1968):

All the great Lutheran bodies confess—and not one denies—the authority of Sacred Scripture. In all the discussions among Lutheran bodies in our day we should be very clear about this: LC-MS, ALC and LCA according to their constitutions and official statements all believe, teach and confess “Scripture Alone” as norm and authority for the teaching and proclamation of the Church.… And more—there is not one shred of evidence that any one of these church bodies tolerates individual teachers who deny the principle of “Scripture Alone”.…

Indeed, Montgomery’s “expose is so prejudiced and warped that this reader was left wondering:

1. Is Montgomery merely a bad reporter?

2. Or is he simply not interested in speaking words which correspond to fact?

3. Or does he want to polarize and divide rather than edify the Body of Christ?

… I seriously doubt whether historical truth or the Lord of the Church is being served by the series so far.… Concordia Seminary

St. Louis, Mo.

Review Reviewed

I appreciate your selecting my book, Guaranteed Annual Income: The Moral Issues, for review (Dec. 20), and I take no offense from your reviewer’s apparent disagreement with the book’s perspective. Given his more extremely conservative orientation on economic questions, such disagreement is inevitable and ought to be expressed.

At two points, however, the review may have misled your readers. In the first place, Mr. Opitz suggests that I do not believe in work “as a virtue as well as a necessity.” But the book emphatically states my belief that work is of the very essence of man’s nature as God has created him. Work is man’s fitting, proper, and active response to God’s prior gifts of creation and grace. I did make a point of distinguishing between this broader perspective on work and a narrower view which quite unbiblically limits work to what we get paid for doing. Possibly the reviewer understands work only in this more limited perspective.

The other point has to do with the basic theological standpoint. One could read Mr. Opitz’s review without any inkling of the basic theological arguments which form the heart of my perspective, particularly the discussions of grace and creation. My discussion makes no claim of infallibility. But surely every evangelical Christian needs to ponder the relationship between the central doctrines of Christian faith and the economic issues of the day. Otherwise we run the risk of selling out our faith by deciding questions only on the basis of secular economic ideologies.

Wesley Theological Seminary

Washington, D. C.

The professional historian of antiquity has often looked with a skeptical eye upon the evidence of traditions, such as those incorporated in Homer, Herodotus, and the Old Testament, and transmitted from generation to generation. The relatively young discipline of archaeology has tempered this skepticism by uncovering materials and inscriptions that have at various points confirmed the traditions.

A great many of the traditions, however, still lack corroborative external evidence. Scholars often assume that these unconfirmed traditions must remain suspect. This attitude may be one of commendable reserve, but it is also one that is based partly on an argument from silence—an argument that is precarious because of the accidents of overlap in areas of evidence, and because of the fragmentary nature of the archaeological evidence.

Overlapping Areas Of Evidence

The non-traditional and therefore contemporary evidence may be divided into two categories: (1) material remains, and (2) inscriptional evidence. The first category could include a subcategory of artistic evidence for areas such as Greece. But for Israelite history this kind of evidence is scanty. Inscriptional evidence would include such documents as royal inscriptions, letters, treaties, and contracts, of which relatively few have been found in Palestine in contrast to the thousands of texts from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Greece.

Plotting the sources of our evidence for ancient history as overlapping circles reveals that there are theoretically seven possible combinations: three in which one source stands alone, three in which two sources overlap, and an ideal situation in which the three sources overlap.

That each of these combinations may occur may be seen from a chart of the evidence for plants and animals prepared by Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age (1964). In her list, inscriptions are represented by Linear B texts, and tradition by Homer. (1) The apple is attested alone in Homer; (2) the mint alone in Linear B; (3) the almond alone by excavations; (4) the pear by both Homer and excavations; (5) the cypress by both Homer and Linear B; (6) the coriander by both Linear B and excavations; and (7) linen by all three sources.

The implication of this random distribution is that just as an object may be attested alone by excavations or alone by inscriptions, it may very often stand alone in the traditions without any necessary reflection upon its authenticity. Yet scholars have often assumed that the overlap of traditions with either inscriptional or material evidence is not only desirable but necessary.

Now, until the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris in 1952, there was no corroborating evidence from inscriptions for the Homeric traditions. Even with the decipherment some scholars are troubled that Homer does not mention the frescoes of the Mycenaeans, and that the epics do not reflect the bureaucracy of the Linear B texts. But one should not expect laundry lists in epics, any more than he should look for stock quotations in poetry.

In a collection of hundreds of Sumerian proverbs, there is not a single reference to law or to painting. Yet no one doubts that these proverbs are an intimate reflection of their times. Some scholars have been convinced that the traditional Sumerian King List is not reliable since few rulers appear both in the List and in inscriptions. But Jacobsen has shown that there are good reasons for the omission of the rulers of Lagash, for example, from the List (T. Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List [1939], p. 180).

Critics were convinced that the Book of Daniel was inaccurate since it referred not to Nabonidus, the last Neo-Babylonian king, but to Belshazzar. But cuneiform documents published since 1924 have brought to light the extraordinary and unpredictable exile of Nabonidus from Babylon to Arabia, so that the “kingship” of Babylon was left to Belshazzar his son.

Often it is assumed that the historicity of a person is suspect unless corroborated by inscriptional evidence (e.g., Darius the Mede in the book of Daniel). Attempts to identify a person in a tradition with someone in the inscriptions often founder on the lack of overlapping evidence. Before the discovery of cuneiform documents that identified Belshazzar as the son of Nabonidus, some declared his name a pure invention, and others tried to identify him with Evil-Merodach or Neriglissar. Tatnai (Ezra 5:3, 6) was mistakenly identified with the satrap over Babylon, Ushtannu, until in 1944 Olmstead called attention to a text where Ta-at-tan-ni is mentioned as a governor subordinate to the satrap (A. Olmstead, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 3 [1944], p. 46).

Scholars have questioned the authenticity of the Sanballat mentioned by Josephus as a contemporary of Alexander the Great. Many thought this was a mistaken reference to the Sanballat who lived in the time of Nehemiah (c. 445 B.c.). The discovery in 1962 of the Aramaic papyri (dated 375–335 B.C.) now makes clear that there were three Sanballats—one in Nehemiah’s time, a second at the time of the papyri, and a third in the time of Alexander (F. Cross, The Biblical Archaeologist, 26 [1963], p. 120).

The reference in Luke 3:1 to Lysanias, a tetrarch of Abilene in the time of John the Baptist (A.D. 27), was considered an error since the only known Lysanias of the area was one executed by Cleopatra in 36 B.c. But then the publication of a Greek inscription from Abila proved that there was a Lysanias who was a tetrarch between A.D. 14 and 29 (F. F. Bruce, “Archaeological Confirmation of the New Testament,” in Revelation and the Bible, ed. Carl F. H. Henry [1958], p. 327).

If we had had to depend upon inscriptional evidence to prove the historicity of Pontius Pilate, we would have had to wait until 1961, when the first epigraphical documentation concerning him was discovered at Caesarea (J. Vardaman, Journal of Biblical Literature, 81 [1962], p. 70).

The Fragmentary Nature Of The Evidence

Historians of antiquity in using the archaeological evidence have very often failed to realize how slight is the evidence at our disposal. It would not be exaggerating to point out that what we have is but one fraction of a second fraction of a third fraction of a fourth fraction of a fifth fraction of the possible evidence.

First of all, only a fraction of what is made or what is written ever survives. Only about one-tenth of the works of the three greatest Greek dramatists—Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles—have come down to us. Of all the Greek lyric poets who wrote in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., we have manuscripts only for Theognis and Pindar, and just fragments for the rest.

Although we know from clay sealings that papyri were used, none has been recovered from the Minoan-Mycenaean period in the Aegean, and from the Seleucid period in lower Mesopotamia. Wax tablets were also used for writing, but the only examples of writing on wax recovered are isolated finds from Nimrud, Gordion, Fayyum, and Marsiliana (in Etruria) (M. Mallowan, Nimrud and Its Remains [1966], pp. 152 ff.).

Inscriptions listing the twenty-four courses of the priesthood probably hung in hundreds of synagogues in Palestine. Thus far, only fragments of two such inscriptions have been recovered—one found at Ascalon in the 1920s, and fragments from Caesarea in the 1960s. In a fragment from Caesarea (dated to the third and fourth centuries A.D.), the name “Nazareth” appears. “This is the only time so far that the name ‘Nazareth’ has been found in an inscription, in particular in a Hebrew inscription; it is also the earliest occurrence of the name in Hebrew” (M. Avi-Yonah, The Teacher’s Yoke, ed. J. Vardaman [1964], p. 48). The next occurrence of the name in a Hebrew inscription is in a Genizah piyyutim (liturgical poem) fragment of the eleventh century!

In the second place, only a fraction of the available sites have been surveyed. “All in all, well over three hundred Mycenaean sites are known, and it is probable that this number would be quadrupled if all Greece were carefully explored for evidence” (A. Samuel, The Mycenaeans in History [1966], p. 101).

In Mesopotamia, Agade, the capital of the Akkadian kingdom, and Washukani, the capital of Mitanni, have not yet been positively identified. In Anatolia it was only in 1956 that Derbe, a site visited by the Apostle Paul, was discovered.

In 1944 the Palestine Gazette listed a total of about 3,000 sites in Cis-Jordan and several hundred in Trans-Jordan. In 1963 the total of known sites increased to about 5,000. The Israeli surveys of 1968, covering the Golan Heights, Samaria, and Judah, have increased this total. Moshe Kochavi, the director of the Judean survey, writes (in a letter of November, 1968): “Our Survey surveyed about 1,200 sites, of which some 20–30 per cent are new sites previously unrecorded. A second phase of the Survey, which is being carried out now, may lead to the same results.… I estimate that not more than one-third of the amount of possible sites were recorded, and a thorough survey is a question of many years (including the yet unsurveyed parts of pre-war Israel).”

One momentous result of the recent survey is that Albright’s identification of Tell Beit Mirsim with biblical Debir will have to be abandoned in favor of the new site of Rabud, excavated by Kochavi in the summer of 1968.

In the third place, only a fraction of the surveyed sites have been excavated. In 1963 Paul Lapp estimated that of a total of 5,000 sites in Palestine there had been scientific excavations at about 150, including twenty-six major excavations. “To be sure, many of the sites on record would not merit extensive excavation, but if only one in four were promising, major excavations have till now been carried out at only 2 per cent of the potential sites” (The Biblical Archaeologist, 26 [1963], p. 122).

Seton Lloyd notes that by 1949 more than 5,000 mounds had been located in Iraq (Mounds of the Near East [1963], p. 99). As of 1962, Beek’s atlas recorded twenty-eight major excavations in Iraq, less than 1 per cent of the total sites (Atlas of Mesopotamia [1962], map 2). When Leonard Woolley wished to excavate in the Amuq plain at the mouth of the Orontes River, he was faced with making a choice among two hundred mounds that dot the plain (A Forgotten Kingdom [1953], p. 20).

Many sites are still occupied so that their excavation is impossible or impractical: e.g., Arbela-Erbil in Iraq, Aleppo-Haleb in Syria, Gaza in Palestine. One of the two mounds of Nineveh, Nebi Yunus, has not been excavated because it is the site of a modern village. At the turn of the century it was possible to move an entire village from the site of an ancient settlement, as at Delphi. Today to excavate the important but occupied site of Thebes in Greece, where soundings have yielded Mesopotamian seals, Linear B texts, and so on, would require at least a million dollars for the expropriation of the land.

In Israel many important and unencumbered mounds still remain unexcavated, e.g., Jezreel, Tell Beersheba, Tell Akko, and Khirbet Muqaneh (possibly Ekron). The last two tells are so extensive that it could cost a million dollars for thorough excavations.

In the fourth place, with the exception of small and short-lived sites such as Qumran and Masada, it is always the case that only a small fraction of any excavated site is actually examined. The wealthy Oriental Institute excavations at Megiddo 1925–34 succeeded in completely removing the top four strata. But this grandiose scheme was abandoned in later seasons and has not been attempted at any site of comparable size. This means that any given excavation may very well miss important finds. (It is embarrassing to report that a cuneiform text of the Gilgamesh epic was found by shepherds in the discarded debris from the excavations at Megiddo.)

The British excavated at Zakro in eastern Crete in 1901. They found houses but missed a palace, which was not found until the excavations begun in 1962. At Ephesus since 1894 the Austrians have found vast remains of the later periods. But nothing of the Bronze Age was found until in 1963 Turkish engineers built a parking lot and found a Mycenaean burial. For decades nothing of the Bronze Age was found at Halicarnassus, until in 1962 George Bass saw a man walking down the street carrying a Mycenaean jar from a nearby village (G. Hanfmann, The Antioch Review [Spring, 1965], p. 42).

In Mesopotamia only a small, unreliable excavation has been conducted at Bismaya (Adab), and hardly any excavation at the important site of Borsippa. Even at Calah-Nimrud, which was the second major site to be excavated in the Near East by Layard (1845–51), followed by Loftus, Rassam, and George Smith (from 1854 at intervals to 1891), the re-excavations by Mallowan (1949–63) have been able to produce magnificent ivories and important texts bearing on the Old Testament. Of Babylon, Saggs notes: “These extensive ruins, of which, despite Koldewey’s work (1899–1917), only a small proportion has been excavated, have during past centuries been extensively plundered for building materials” (Archaeology and Old Testament Study, hereafter abbreviated A.O.T., ed. D. Winton Thomas [1967], p. 41). Excavations at Babylon are complicated by the fact that the earlier levels of Hammurabi’s time are below the water table.

In Palestine from 1902 to 1904 Sellin excavated nearly a fifth of Tell Ta‘annek (in the early days the work was done with less care and therefore more rapidly), and concluded that there were no more important structures to be found and that the city had never been surrounded by a fortification wall. In 1963 Lapp found both a fortification wall and important structures there.

From soundings made at Hazor in 1928, Garstang concluded that the site was not an important city in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries because of “the complete absence of Mykenaean specimens” (A.O.T., p. 247). Yadin in his excavations found houses littered with Mycenaean pottery. The site at Hazor comprises an upper city of thirty acres and a lower city of 175 acres. Working with an unusually large staff of more than thirty archaeologists and a crew of more than a hundred laborers, Yadin managed to clear 1/400 of the site—that is 1/1,600 per season from 1955 to 1958. “He has suggested that it would take eight hundred years of about four or five months work (the normal season is three months) per year to clear the entire site” (W. F. Albright, New Horizons in Biblical Research [1966], p. 3).

Some sites in the Near East are even larger than Hazor: “The largest city was undoubtedly Babylon in the Chaldean period; its area covered 2,500 acres. Then follows Nineveh, with 1,850 acres, while Uruk was somewhat smaller, with 1,110 acres. Other cities are much smaller: Hattusha, the Hittite capital, occupied 450 acres; Assur had only 150 acres. Among the royal cities, Dur-Sharrukin was 600 acres; Calah, 800 acres” (A. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia [1964], p. 140). At Yadin’s estimated rate of progress for Hazor, a complete excavation of Babylon would take at least 8,000 years!

In the fifth place, only a fraction of the materials, and especially the inscriptions, produced by excavations have ever been published. Samuel Kramer estimates that 10 per cent of the 500,000 cuneiform texts recovered have been published.

Nippur was the earliest site to be excavated by the Americans (1889–1900). To a large extent these Sumerian texts have been published, though many unpublished texts remain. But few of the texts from the current (since 1948) University of Chicago excavations at Nippur have been published. More than 16,000 texts have come from Kanish (Kultepe) in eastern Turkey since 1882. Of these texts dated to the Old Assyrian period, about 2,000 have been published. “The main body of texts, excavated by the Turkish Historical Society since 1948, has remained unpublished but for a handful of tablets and is not accessible to scholars” (Oppenheim, p. 397). It is a warning of the incompleteness of our documentation that no text of the Old Assyrian merchants has yet been discovered in Assur proper.

Of the 20,000 documents and letters found at Mari, about 1,300 have been published. Of the Assyrian letters found at Nineveh, about 2,000 are still unpublished in the British Museum. The royal correspondence from Nineveh dates from Sargon II (722–705) to Ashurbanipal (669–633). It is an accident of either survival or discovery that no letter to Sennacherib (705–682) is to be found in this corpus.

The main bulk of the tablets excavated by the University of Chicago 1930–36 at Tell Asmar (Eshnunna) remains unpublished. Many of the texts found at Adab in 1903 and 1904 are unpublished, as are many texts from Babylon.

Material remains, such as Greek pottery found at Near Eastern sites (e.g. Babylon), are sometimes unpublished. The reports on the Beth Shean dig, completed in 1933, have not been fully published, though a work on levels V and IV is forthcoming.

If one could by an overly optimistic estimate reckon that ¼ of our materials and inscriptions survived, that ¼ of the available sites have been surveyed, that ¼ of those sites have been excavated, that ¼ of the excavated sites have been examined, and that ¼ of the materials and inscriptions excavated have been published, one would still have less than 1/1,000 of the possible evidence (¼×¼×¼×¼×¼). Realistically speaking, the percentage is no doubt even smaller, as suggested in the following example from the Roman world:

In the first three hundred years of the empire there were never less than twenty-five Roman legions, and each legion had five thousand men. The legions were paid three times a year, so that there were 375,000 pay vouchers a year. Multiply that by three hundred, and the result is 112.5 million. Of those, only six and a fragment of a seventh survive [Samuel, The Mycenaeans in History, p. 82].

Problems And Promise

In view of the incompleteness of the excavations and the inadequacy of archaeological experience, some early attempts to associate the excavations with the traditions have proved to be mistaken. Schliemann in his first excavation at Troy thought that he had found “Priam’s” treasures in Level II; he was mistaken by over a thousand years in dating that level to the tradition of the Trojan War. A so-called Jebusite wall found by Macalister in Jerusalem 1923–24 has been redated by Kenyon’s new excavations to the Hellenistic period, a millennium later. Garstang attributed walls found at Jericho to Joshua’s time, but they belonged to the Early Bronze Age, nearly a millennium earlier.

There are complex problems in relating the archaeological evidence of the destruction of sites to the tradition of the Israelite conquest. From data from Bethel, Tell Beit Mirsim, Lachish, and Hazor, Albright has proposed a thirteenth-century date for the conquest that has been widely accepted. But Jericho seems to have been destroyed in the fourteenth century (A.O.T., p. 273), and Ai captured in the twelfth century (J. Callaway, Journal of Biblical Literature, 87 [1968], pp. 312–20).

On the whole, however, it may be safely said that the mass of archaeological evidence has strikingly confirmed the traditions and corrected radical skepticism.

In 1950, H. Lorimer in Homer and the Monuments wished to excise the metal greave and the bronze corslet from the epics, since at that time no known examples had been found in Greece. In 1953 metal greaves were found in Achaea. Then in 1960 at Dendra, not only greaves but also the first Late Bronze corslet were found. In 1963 a second metal corslet from the Mycenaean period was found at Thebes (A. Snodgrass, Early Greek Armour and Weapons [1964], p. 71).

In 1948 G. Hanfmann denied the tradition of an Ionian migration to western Asia Minor in the eleventh century B.C. and claimed that this had not taken place until 800 B.C. (American Journal of Archaeology, 52 [1948], pp. 135–55). The same writer seventeen years later acknowledges that recent finds of Proto-Geometric pottery have now confirmed the traditions of an early migration (The Antioch Review [Spring, 1965], pp. 41–59).

C. Torrey in his Ezra Studies (1910) branded the Aramaic of Ezra a forgery. Among other discoveries that demonstrate the authenticity of Ezra’s Aramaic is a papyrus fragment in Aramaic found in 1942 at Saqqara in Egypt, which is dated to the time of Nebuchadnezzar (J. Bright, The Biblical Archaeologist, 12 [1949], pp. 46–52). Torrey in his Pseudo-Ezekiel and the Original Prophecy (1930) denied the authenticity of the dating of Ezekiel’s prophecies by years of Jehoiachin’s captivity and also Ezekiel’s picture of the material situation of the exiles. Discoveries of jar-stamps in Palestine in the 1930’s and the publication of the ration texts from Babylon by Weidner in 1939 have fully vindicated Ezekiel (W. Albright, The Biblical Archaeologist, 5 [1942], pp. 49–55).

We can agree with D. Winton Thomas, who says (A.O.T., p. xxxii): “Archaeological research will, we may believe, continue steadily to show that the Old Testament narrative is essentially trustworthy.…” And we may add, for the next 8,000 years of excavations!

Halford Lucco*ck tells of a family called Danks who were devoted to one another and had a happy home. Mr. Danks was a song-writer, which was a very precarious business, and they were poor. But their poverty seemed to draw them closer together. Danks was so impressed with this affection that he wrote a song everybody now knows, “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” The song brought him fame and fortune—but it also brought discord and unhappiness. The home was broken up, and in time Mr. and Mrs. Danks were separated. Some years later he was found dead, kneeling beside his bed in a cheap boarding house in Philadelphia. On the bed beside him lay an old copy of “Silver Threads” with these words written across it: “It is hard to grow old alone” (The Halford Lucco*ck Treasury, p. 417).

Without doubt it is harder to know how to abound than to know how to be abased. As the Scottish proverb has it, “It is more difficult to carry a full cup than an empty one.” And the problem of handling prosperity in a responsible Christian manner has never been more acute than it is in our affluent American society of today. Reinhold Niebuhr puts it pointedly: “How can we get a gas-propelled fur-coated congregation of prosperous Americans to share the uneasy sense over possessions that is so characteristic a note of the New Testament?”

How indeed does a Christian in our modern day learn “how to abound”?

1. By remembering that all abundance, however great, comes from God, the giver of every good and perfect gift. When Joseph Parker, for many years minister of the City Temple in London, was introduced to someone who described himself as “a self-made man,” he is said to have replied, “You lift a great responsibility from the shoulders of the Almighty.” But the fact is that there is no self-made man. For one thing, nature greatly helps to produce the abundance that men enjoy; a scientist has figured that a farmer’s effort amounts to only about 5 per cent of the factors that produce a crop of wheat. Other people, too, and the community in general, help greatly in the production of a man’s wealth. There came to New York City in 1783 a young man named John Jacob Astor, the son of a butcher in Waldorf, Germany. He invested his small capital in furs and traded directly with the Indians, peddling gewgaws and buying their furs at ridiculously low prices. In time he extended this trade to the Pacific Coast, and his ships prospered in the China trade. Undoubtedly he was something of an organizing genius, but it certainly was not by his own efforts alone that the farm he bought in Manhattan for $25,000 increased in value to approximately $500,000,000. It was the growth of the community as a whole that pushed up the value of this property. Edward A. Filene, the great Boston merchant, recognized the truth that the community helps to create abundance when he said: “Why should not I give half my money back to the people? I got it from them.”

Even where a man has contributed significantly to the production of his wealth, it is still God who gave him the power to produce, the ability and opportunity to become prosperous. He has no personal responsibility for this at all. In the truest sense, then, all abundance comes from God.

2. By remembering that, though material prosperity is not unimportant, people and personal relations are infinitely more important for fruitful and happy living.

In Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol the miser, Scrooge, is confronted in a dream by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley. During his lifetime Marley, like Scrooge, had been hard and stingy. And now from the realm of the departed the spirit of Marley appears, condemning himself and warning Scrooge against a similar fate. As the ghost of Marley wrings his hands and bemoans his shortcomings, Scrooge tries to console him: “But you were a good man of business, Jacob.” Whereupon Marley’s ghost cries out: “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence were all my business.” Too late Jacob Marley discovered what his real business in life was.

Several years ago the Reader’s Digest carried the story of General Robert E. Wood, who after a distinguished Army career joined the board of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1924, becoming its president in 1928. Under his guidance Sears grew into the biggest general store in the world, doing an annual sales business of $5 million. Certainly General Wood has been one of America’s most successful businessmen; an industrialist once said that “three of the biggest influences in business are General Motors, General Electric, and General Wood.” But Wood also had a deep concern for people, and particularly the employees of his company. So he developed a profit-sharing plan, under which each employee contributes up to 5 per cent of his annual salary, the company contributes up to 10 per cent of its annual net profit, and the proceeds are divided up among the employees according to their length of service. Since its beginning this scheme has enabled retiring employees to receive $1.2 billion. General Wood says he is “prouder of it than of anything else I ever did in business.”

3. By remembering that life doesn’t last forever, and that eternity knows no abundance except the riches of character and spirit.

Jesus Christ sought to enforce this salutary lesson in two memorable parables, the parable of Lazarus and Dives (Luke 16:19–31) and the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16–20). The point of these parables is that no matter how wealthy a man may be in this world’s goods, his riches will confer on him no lasting benefit unless he uses them to help those who are in need. Only as a man takes this lesson seriously to heart will he be able to say with Paul, “I know both how to be abased and how to abound.”

Evangelicals are called “People of the Book,” or sometimes “bibliolaters” or venerators of a “paper pope.” But I wonder how accurate these labels really are. How effectively is God’s Word being studied and communicated today?

Recently I heard about a teacher in a Christian college who his first semester of teaching biblical studies made a particular point of repeating key terms, spelling them out and writing them on the blackboard. He thought he was making himself perfectly clear to his students. But much to his chagrin, at the end of that semester he found himself with an “Odd Answer File,” a collection of such answers as these: The place where Moses received the law was Mount Sinus. Overshadowing the mercy seat were two golden cherry emblems. In Numbers 35 there were appointed six cities of refuse. The two agricultural products of Palestine were tobacco and wheat. Roman Catholic theologians speak of two kinds of sin, moral and venereal.

If this happens in the college classroom, what must be the problems of communication between a pastor and his congregation or a Sunday-school teacher and her pupils? I am convinced that we have something valuable to learn from the Jews as we try to bring about more effective biblical teaching.

We have assumed that a brief period of instruction on Sunday morning can make our young people well versed in the Scriptures and the Judeo-Christian heritage. Not long ago a rabbi friend of mine was lamenting the fact that many adults in his congregation viewed the main responsibility of the synagogue as training children in the tradition until the age of thirteen. The rabbi referred to this as “pediatric Judaism.” He deeply regretted the feeling of these adults that continuing education in the faith was not really very important once a child had received his Bar Mitzvah. In a similar vein, we should ask why in our churches the Sunday-school attrition rate is so high among those between twelve and fourteen. We greatly need teachers who not only love, accept, and understand these young people but also can make the Scriptures come to life in addressing the perplexing problems of the merging adolescent.

The Jews have historically viewed the synagogue as having a threefold function. Not only is it a “House of Assembly” where social life is carried on and a “House of Prayer” where worship is made, but it is also a “House of Study.” Indeed, so basic to the life of the synagogue is study and learning that in the Yiddish language a synagogue is called shut, whose German source Schule means “school.” Many of the synagogues throughout America are concerned enough about the Hebrew heritage to provide instruction on weekday afternoons (and on weekends too) both in Hebrew and in the traditions of Judaism. Can evangelicals afford to settle for less than is required of many Jewish children? The Christian may try to ease his conscience by appealing to family devotions or Sunday-evening young people’s meetings. But these clearly are not enough, since we still have the problem of inarticulate and sometimes biblically illiterate Christians. Perhaps when a pastor hears, “My son went to the university and came back an agnostic,” or, “He’s in the army and has lost his faith,” he would do well to ask that parent: What quality of faith did your son have to lose? A brief Sunday scanning of Scripture can hardly be expected to produce a stable, well-informed, well-grounded Christian.

Are the biblical truths pastors preach coming through to the man in the pew as clearly as anticipated? Not always. A church deacon recently admitted that for many years he had understood the words of Christ that “man shall not live by bread alone” to mean that man also needs some meat and vegetables to stay alive. One summer Sunday a church that had been exposed to premillennial teaching continually for some twenty-five years had a guest speaker whose topic was, “The Biblical Doctrine of Amillennialism.” Problems? No. Not one lay person detected any difference in emphasis.

The Talmud of the Jews states that in the world to come the first three questions asked of a man are, “Did you buy and sell in good faith? Did you have a set time for study? Did you raise a family?” It may well be that the second of these questions has something vital to say to us Christians.

For the Jew, piety has long been bound up with learning. The rabbis taught, “An ignorant man cannot be a pious man.” One Talmudic sage even wrote, “He who does not study deserves to die.” Because the rabbis viewed scholarly study of the Torah as a kind of sacrament, spiritual suicide resulted from its neglect.

The principal function of a rabbi historically has been that of scholar-teacher. He is responsible for transmitting the heritage of his faith to young and old alike. Unlike the Christian minister, who usually claims a call from God, the rabbi has an authority based primarily on his learning. He is trained in a yeshivah or seminary to be a teacher and interpreter of the Jewish tradition. A command of Jewish law and ethical tradition is not acquired overnight. The rabbi who desires to be an articulate interpreter views the study of Scriptures and tradition as a lifelong process. His task is to take the customs and traditions of the past and make them pertinent and meaningful to the present. Is the task of the Christian engaged in the exposition of God’s Word any less demanding?

The New Testament shows that Christ was addressed as “rabbi” on a number of occasions; in fact, the gospel writers make nearly twice as many references to Christ’s teaching ministry as to his preaching ministry. Around Christ clustered a group of disciples eager to learn at the feet of their Master, who poured new meaning and life into the Jewish dogmas of the day.

Like his Lord, the Christian pastor is ordained to a teaching ministry for the purpose of producing disciples. One of Christ’s gifts to his church was the role of pastor-teacher: “His gifts were that some should be … pastors and teachers” (Eph. 4:11). A basic rule of Greek syntax suggested by Granville Sharp well over a century ago suggests that this verse refers not to separate offices in the church but rather to a single office, the combination of the teaching and pastoral gifts in one man. Paul makes this clear to the young pastor Timothy when he writes that “the Lord’s servant must … be … an apt teacher” (2 Tim. 2:24; cf. 1 Tim. 3:2).

The pastor, like the rabbi, has the responsibility of transmitting the heritage of his faith to others. Good teaching produces a chain reaction. With the making of disciples comes the training of others to teach. The task that Paul described to Timothy embraces four generations of teachers: “What you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2). Tradition (paradosis) in the New Testament was the handing down” or “over” of that which had been received (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3). Tradition, then, was at the very heart of the kerygma of the early Church, where the pastor-teacher, like the rabbi, was engaged in perpetuating what had been handed down to him.

In Christ’s challenge of “making disciples of all nations,” today’s pastor-teacher finds a demanding task. As a teacher, he must be more than a textbook wired for sound. He must be allowed to spend time in study so that he can effectively feed men the Word of the Spirit of God. It is of interest that Hehrew, which often paints word pictures, uses the same consonants to express the noun “ox goad” and the verb “learn” or “teach.”

My plea is not only to the pastor-teacher but to the Church as well. Could it be that many in the ministry today would have to answer no if ever asked in the world to come, “Did you have a set time for study?” Today’s pastor-teacher is trying to wear too many hats at once. Lay people sometimes fail to realize that it takes time to dig in and prepare adequately. Some seem to assume that by the “teaching ministry” of the Holy Spirit, a man of the cloth is virtually an omnicompetent, walking commentary on any of the thousands of verses in Holy Scripture. But facility in the Scriptures comes only through much time spent in thorough study. In many churches, a splendid array of trivia confronts the pastor in his study each morning, hindering his “set time.”

Another obstacle facing the pastor-teacher is lack of tools and resources for study. No church would think of hiring a sexton without providing him with proper tools. With no broom or snow shovel, a church custodian would soon be looking elsewhere for employment. Surely it would not strain church budgets to build into the pastor-teacher’s salary an annual $100 allowance for his library. The congregation would receive direct benefit in return.

A great unfulfilled wish of many ministers is for a continuation of their education. An effective teacher does more than simply recite time-tested facts; he needs a constant inflow of insights and ideas to keep him stimulated. Conferences and seminars on pastoral psychology, inner city problems, and the like are valuable for some ministers. Others would prefer an opportunity to take courses at nearby seminaries and universities. The answers provided for seminary students a decade ago are not adequate for the complex and changing questions of today’s pastorate.

Rabbis, pastors, and teachers—do you have a set time for study?

Part of the weakness of the Christian movement in our generation has been the relative lack of emphasis upon belief. There are three areas that must be cultivated if any faith is to be a living faith: the inner life of devotion, the intellectual life of rational thought, and the outer life of human service. There is no doubt as to which of these has been most neglected in our time; it is the emphasis upon rational belief. Christian books dealing with prayer and worship have been plentiful; books urging men and women to tasks of mercy have been abundant; but good books helping people to arrive at sound convictions have been scarce. Even some which would appear to be concerned with belief only succeed in repeating the questions by which people are already disturbed, rather than in providing any clear answers. Popular preachers stay very close to social issues and avoid involvement in the problems of ultimate faith. Yet it is a revealing fact that when men such as John Stott, rector of All Souls’ Church in London, have the courage and wisdom to engage in an affirmative approach to Basic Christianity they receive a tremendous hearing, particularly from the young.

However good and important human service is, it loses its motive power when the sustaining beliefs are allowed to wither. That mere humanistic idealism has a natural tendency to end in bitterness is not really surprising. People do disappoint us, and if we have nothing more fundamental upon which to depend than the natural goodness of man we are bound to end in a mood of futility. The social witness of the modern Church, especially in regard to racial justice, is very important, but we need to remember that the social gospel depends ultimately upon convictions. Unless it is true that each person, regardless of race or sex, is one who is made in the image of the Living God, much of the impetus of work for social justice is removed. Such work may go on for a generation, by social momentum, but it will not continue much longer. The “slip carriage” detached from its engine finally comes to a full stop. Social momentum is not permanent.

The rejection of creeds in the modern Christian Church is easily understandable. It is a fact that the words of both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creed seem to many in our generation merely antique, having lost their power by constant repetition. But confusion arises when people move from an antipathy for particular creeds to rejection of all creedal expression, for then the woeful result is that they have nothing upon which to build their lives.

There is really no hope for the Christian faith apart from tough-mindedness in matters of belief. If God is not, then the sooner we find it out the better. If belief in God is not true, it is an evil and should be eliminated from our entire universe of discourse. False belief is evil because it diverts energy from practical tasks that require attention. If prayer is not an objective encounter with the Living God, we shall do well to make this discovery and give up the nonsense as soon as possible.

We hear, repeatedly, the cliche that deeds are everything while beliefs are unimportant; but this is manifest nonsense. The truth is that belief leads to action, and acting often depends upon believing. We are wise to remind ourselves of what Dr. Johnson said to Boswell on July 14, 1763, apropos of a man who denied the existence of a moral order: “If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our house, let us count our spoons” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson [John B. Alden, 1887], I, 346). If men believe that slaves are not fully human they will treat them as they treat animals. A man who is convinced that something is impossible will not, if he is intelligent, try to produce it.

Unfortunately, the intellectual effort that modern man so desperately needs, especially in his faith, is not being generally encouraged. Instead, there is a real diseouragement produced by the preaching of anti-intellectualism. What we hear and read, over and over, is that the existence of God cannot be proved. The consequence is that many draw the erroneous conclusion that all items of faith are devoid of intellectual support. Since men certainly will not seek what they are convinced they cannot have, the effort to develop a reasoned faith is naturally not even attempted. Examples of abdication in the face of rational difficulty are easy to find, not only among average churchmen, but also among religious leaders. Joseph Fletcher subscribes with charming simplicity to the anti-intellectualist creed, and with no qualification, when he concludes that “Philosophy is utterly useless as a way to bridge the gap between doubt and faith” (Situation Ethics [Westminster, 1966], p. 41). A similar position is expressed by the pastor of Judson Church in New York when he describes the new mood in the congregation which he guides. “The Judson people,” he says proudly, “are learning to live in a world of the withering away of apologetics” (Howard Moody in Who’s Killing the Church? [Church Missionary Society, 1960], p. 87).

What we need desperately, at this particular juncture in the enduring human crisis, is the emergence of Christian intellectuals. If Basic Christianity is to survive, it must be served by a highly dedicated and highly trained group of persons who are unabashed and unapologetic in the face of opposition and ridicule. They must be able to outthink as well as outlive all attacks on the central faith which we so sorely need as an alternative to confusion. Because this has been possible in many other generations of need, there is good reason to believe that it is possible again. Professor Pelikan has pointed out what is sometimes forgotten: that the leaders of the Reformation were themselves keen intellectuals. He refers to men of the stature of Calvin as “a cadre of intellectuals” (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Intellectual [Harper & Row, 1965], p. 17). Being himself an example as well as an exponent of Christian intellectualism, Professor Pelikan deserves to be heard.

It is not hard to see how popular anti-intellectualism has arisen. It is a revolt against the kind of rationalism represented by St. Thomas Aquinas, which some say may convince the mind but not the heart. Furthermore, many are vaguely aware of the criticisms of the tradtional arguments for the existence of God in the work of Immanuel Kant and his successors. But as so often occurs in the history of human thought, the tendency is to fall into an extreme even worse than the one that is being rejected. This has, in fact, occurred in our time. However bad some arid intellectualism has been, anti-intellectualism is worse, since it provides no antidote to either superstition or wish-thinking. If the tough-minded concern for evidence and for consistency is given up, there is no way to detect error, or even to distinguish between degrees of probability. Archbishop Temple touched exactly the right note when he pointed out that “the most important of mental disciplines for almost all purposes is not that which distinguishes between certainty and probability, but that which leads to discrimination between degrees of probability” (William Temple, Nature, Man and God [London: Macmillan, 1934], p. 84).

The familiar statement that God cannot be proved is fundamentally ambiguous. On one hand it may mean that the existence of the One whom Christ called Father cannot be proved beyond a shadow of doubt, but on the other hand it may mean, and often does mean, that there is no valid evidence for the being of God. One does not need to be a professional philosopher to see that these two meaning differ radically. Part of the trouble lies in the fact that, while the writer may mean the first, the reader may interpret him as meaning the second, with the result that faith is further eroded.

The time has now come to point out that the sentence, “God cannot be proved,” while true, is profoundly misleading. Furthermore, it is often used in a way which is manifestly dishonest, because care is not taken to add that absolute proof is not possible anywhere else. Without the addition of this important observation, the reader is not to be blamed if he concludes, erroneously, that items of Christian faith are without support while items in other fields, such as science, have the value of certainty.

It is now widely recognized that absolute proof is something which the human being does not and cannot have. This follows necessarily from the twin fact that deductive reasoning cannot have certainty about its premises and that inductive reasoning cannot have certainty about its conclusions. The notion that, in natural science, we have both certainty and absolute proof is simply one of the superstitions of our age. We have, of course, high probability, but that is a different matter. Even in the first great burst of scientific reasoning, in what Alfred North Whitehead called “the century of genius,” it was already recognized that absolute proof is not given to finite minds. Thus Blaise Pascal asked his fellow scientists, “Who has demonstrated that there will be a tomorrow, and that we shall die?” He knew that all science depends upon assumptions which are incapable of proof.

Once we face honestly the fact that complete demonstration is not within our scope, we are in a far better situation to do what we can do. Whether we are considering the existence of God or the existence of atoms, we need not, because we lack certainty, give up the effort to believe honestly, for though nothing is supported perfectly, some items of faith are far better supported than others. The horoscope predictions which still appear in our newspapers are not based upon any evidence which will bear full examination, whereas the conclusions of modern astronomy are supported by abundant and cumulative evidence. The way of wisdom is not to give up the effort to believe when we recognize that absolute certainty is denied us, but rather to recognize degrees of evidential value. The practical danger of all perfectionism is that it leads so easily to abandonment of the comparative good which is possible. Though we may never know, in this life, the absolute truth about anything, we have sufficient evidence on which to proceed, and we can at least rid our minds of frauds.

The greatest danger that comes from frequent repetition of the phrase, “God cannot be proved,” is that it lodges in the public mind the idea that reason has nothing to do with the matter at all. This leads millions to the impotence of mere “fideism.” The word means acceptance of “faith alone,” with no concern for intellectual content. The crucial difficulty of this position, however popular it may be at times, is that it provides no means of choosing between radically different faiths. It gives no basis for rejecting the Nazi faith or even the faith of voodooism. Once the life of reason is rejected, there is no reason why any one faith is better or worse than any other. The pathetic fact is that the people who say they do not need to give reasons for the objective validity of the faith they espouse do not seem to realize how sad the consequences of their position are.

The current rejection of apologetics is both misguided and futile, for it abandons the citadel to the enemy. Even the harshest critic of Basic Christianity has no objection to the affirmation of a faith which cannot defend itself before thoughtful minds, since he can afford to be tolerant of anything so weak, because he is fundamentally contemptuous. Accordingly, one of the most urgent tasks of contemporary Christians is to express a faith which can be made credible for modern man. Enthusiasm is not enough! It will do something for a while, but it will soon evaporate unless the faith which is espoused can be so stated that those who do not share the enthusiasm can be convinced in their minds. (A vivid illustration of this process is provided by the history of Quakerism in the seventeenth century. The movement of George Fox and his contemporaries was saved from the dismal fate of similar movements by the brilliant work of Robert Barclay. Even Voltaire was impressed!) No faith can survive unless it meets the double test of intellectual validity and social relevance.