Page 5954 – Christianity Today (2024)

To maintain interest and attention, the preacher must seek sermonic variety. This is essential in every phase of sermonizing. Here we will consider one phase: sermon strategy.

The stereotype of sermon strategy is: introduction, three points, and conclusion. Although it is a valid strategy, unvarying use may negate its effectiveness. One alternative is the persuasion strategy called suggestion. This is the attempt to establish an idea in the mind of another without logical consideration or analysis. Instead of inviting rational judgment, suggestion invites immediate acceptance.

Suggestion works on the ideomotor principle of psychology: when an idea enters one’s mind, one tends to express the idea in action. Expressing the idea in action depends upon how clearly the idea is perceived, the emotional connotations of the idea, and the counter force of opposing ideas. In awareness of these contingencies, suggestion attempts to plant ideas in the mind of a listener in a way that encounters the least possible resistance. This is done by bypassing his critical thought processes.

Common types of suggestion are: counter, positive, negative, direct, and indirect. Counter suggestion states a suggestion in such a way as to elicit a response that is the converse of what is suggested; that is, one suggests the opposite of what he desires from his listener. The danger is, of course, that if he fails, the speaker will reap the opposite of the desired effect.

To use positive suggestion is to phrase a suggestion affirmatively in order to get the listener to do some act, while in negative suggestion one phrases the suggestion negatively to get the listener to avoid some act. Robert Oliver points out that positive suggestion is to be preferred because “it emphasizes an act to be done, or the proposition to be believed; it is decisive and confident; and it presents a definite program to be adopted” (The Psychology of Persuasive Speech, p. 149).

Direct suggestion takes the form of a command or a maxim and may be either positive or negative. “Do not enter.” “Forward, march!” “Vote for Bill Green.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” The speaker’s idea is explicit, but he gives no rational explanation or support.

Probably the most valuable type of suggestion is the indirect type. The speaker attempts to plant an idea in the hearer’s mind without appearing to do so. The proposition remains implicit—rather than explicit—throughout the speech, and the listener eventually formulates the proposition in his own words. The psychological advantage is that he thinks of it as his own idea. The more indirect the suggestion, the more it can appear to the listener to be his own plan or conclusion, and thus the greater its power. For examples of the power of indirect suggestion, study Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the method of Iago in Othello.

One sermonic method using indirect suggestion is the story form. When the sermon takes the form of a narrative, the idea is present in a structure of events and persons, rather than in mere verbal assertions.

The story form deserves more attention than preachers give it. Its effectiveness is seen in the fact that when Jesus used parables, his enemies got the point without comment, eventually killing him for it. The contemporary sermon needs more balance between general assertions and narratives; we should remember that the Gospel itself is primarily a narrative consisting of people, events, and dialogue.

The story-form sermon will suggest meaning through characters, conversations, and interaction. All points, morals, or lessons to be made are encompassed within the story itself. The preacher must not overinterpret or over-explain, lest he destroy its inherent force.

Within the form of indirect suggestion chosen, the preacher has other persuasive methods at his disposal. He may use rhetorical questions that imply answers in support of his idea. Without argument or assertion, the questions plant in the mind of the listener the conclusions the speaker wishes to establish, and allow the listener to phrase his own answer.

To persuade, one must use the right words. What words will bring the desired responses from listeners? For example, to a certain audience the statement that “sex education in public schools is a Communist plot to pervert our children” needs no logical proof. The words immediately suggest various negative aspects of sex education. Other emotive words bring forth predictable responses from other given audiences—words such as liberal, conservative, progressive, fundamentalist, and Bible-believing. Brembeck and Howell remind us that “the persuader must, within ethical limits, decide what trigger-words are needed to release the response he desires from his audience” (Persuasion: A Means of Social Control, p. 183).

Another method of communicating ideas indirectly is use of conversation. Truth may unfold from conversation that would not be evident or accepted otherwise. Conversation provides drama and identification. To be effective it must consist, not of extended speeches, but of dialogical exchange among characters. David Randolph, in The Renewal of Preaching, offers four guidelines for effective use of dialogue in sermons:

1. Start with language quite like that of genuine conversation.

2. Keep the speeches brief.

3. Make each speech advance the meaning of the conversation.

4. Be sensitive … to the interaction of the tones and the emotional elements in the speakers’ exchange [pp. 67, 68].

The preacher who develops sermons in various forms of suggestion will find that he builds into them the stimuli of attention and interest. As the sermon is prepared under the guidance of a disciplined, sanctified imagination, it can be couched in interesting, picturesque images.

There are, of course, disadvantages to indirect suggestion. Suggestion cannot explore a subject comprehensively since it is directed more to the broad attitude than to a specific point. Thus it may leave some thinking listeners with unanswered questions. Since the technique is subtle, listeners giving inadequate attention may misunderstand the point, or they may hear nothing more than the superficial action of the story and miss the point entirely. When the hearers are left to draw their own conclusions and make their own applications, their responses will vary. It is difficult to advocate a single implied proposition. Yet the astute preacher can work within the limitations to use this sermonic strategy effectively and can achieve the desired ends of interest, attention, and response.—WAYNE HENSLEY, professor of preaching and speech, Minnesota Bible College, Minneapolis.

Unless our lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount are no longer valid, the present emphasis of the Church on poverty is a contradiction to his teachings. The problem is just that simple, and just that complicated.

World poverty and hunger are tragedies beyond description. In Biafra and India lives are wasting away through starvation and malnutrition; we all have seen on our TV screens the shriveled limbs and bloated bellies of their victims.

Poverty in America is a stark reality for many, but now that it has become a political issue there is grave danger that its alleviation will become motivated by other than compassion, and its victims will be pawns in a sociological experiment that can cost billions in waste and bureaucratic management while it destroys initiative and breeds dependence on others.

No one questions the compassionate motive that has prompted many Christians to go “all out” to abolish poverty. But one can seriously question the wisdom of the Church in aligning itself with the government in programs aimed solely at giving material aid.

A physician will use all speed to give an injection of Demerol or some other pain-relieving medicine to a patient in the throes of kidney colic. But he does not stop there; X-rays confirm the diagnosis; rest, relaxants, heat are used; and often there must be surgery and removal of the stone.

If the Church concurs with the findings of experts that poverty can be eradicated by education, better housing, jobs, and a guaranteed minimum income, it has surely turned its back on the solution God offers to all men, and in so doing is compounding rather than solving the problem.

I do not question the responsibility of the government to face up to the fact of poverty and its relief. And I would take my place at the forefront in saying that Christians have a responsibility laid on their hearts to do everything they can to help those in need. There is an immediate responsibility (like the physician’s use of a pain-relieving drug) to show our love and compassion for the poor with the food and clothing at our disposal. But to the Church and the Christian there is responsibility that is theirs alone—the message that when first things are put first in our lives, God has promised to solve the poverty problem in a clear and definite way.

Our Lord laid down a principle in economics that is infallible. It consists of a cause-and-effect relation in which God, not man, determines the outcome. Jesus, having warned his hearers against anxiety over the necessities of life—food, clothing, and a place to live—said, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matt. 6:33). And down through the centuries millions have testified to the truth of this promise.

David wrote: “I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging bread.” On the contrary, he says, “he [the righteous] is ever giving liberally and lending, and his children become a blessing” (Ps. 37:25, 26).

Where but in the promises of God can man find this assurance? “The LORD God is a sun and shield; he bestows favor and honor. No good things does the LORD withhold from those who walk uprightly. O LORD of hosts, blessed is the man who trusts in thee!” (Ps. 84:11, 12).

To whom has this message of God’s loving provision been committed? To the Church. Shall the Church set aside the certainties of God’s promises for the inevitable failures of man-made schemes that seek solutions without reference to the God of solutions? Shall the Church be content with secular means when God offers a solution based on a spiritual reality? To put it bluntly, shall the Church sell its birthright—the promise that God “will never fail you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5), and that he “will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19)—for socio-economic solutions that do not go to the heart of the matter?

If any one thinks I am criticizing the steps being taken to meet the problem of poverty with true compassion and common sense, he has missed my point. The government should meet genuine poverty with genuine aid, but it should not accept poverty as a necessarily permanent condition, nor welfare as an unending way of life.

Furthermore, the Christian whose heart is not moved by immediate need, and who does not respond to that need with a compassion proven by deeds, is unworthy of the name he bears.

But the point I want to stress is that the Church has a message of ultimate solution. If it becomes so involved in the immediate need without facing up to God’s cure, the Church fails to honor its own message.

Only the Christian can understand that above and beyond human need, as we see it with our limited vision, there is a divine concern and a supernatural solution. If the Church ignores the supernatural nature of its message, it is missing the basic reason for its existence.

This year the major denominations are stressing “poverty” and its alleviation, using a sociological approach very similar to that of the government. In fact, year after year some new slogan and some new interest occupies the Church’s program—peace, race, reconciliation (man with man, often with little reference to man with God), and, at the moment, poverty. In a year or two it will be something else.

Who does not want peace? Christian race relations are, or should be, the outward evidence of the indwelling Christ; reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ is the foundation of man’s reconciliation with his fellow man; and helping the poor is a fruit of the Christian faith. But none of these is Christianity. To be a Christian means to have a vital, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and until that is established all other concerns are secondary. We have been busy trying to produce fruit where there are no roots, make non-Christians act like Christians.

Christ came into the world, died, and arose again to enable men to become new creatures. Are we honestly trying so to preach and to live Christ that men may be born again by the Spirit, through faith in him?

How much do many of the programs and emphases of the Church differ from secular approaches to human problems? We may be trying to steal God’s glory for ourselves by seeing how loving and kind we can be while we ignore the love of God for lost sinners.

Are there poor and needy around you? Then, for God’s sake and for his glory, do what you can to help. To the hungry, give food. For the poorly clad, make clothing available.

But above and beyond all this, give them the Bread of Life and tell them of the One who longs to clothe us in his own righteousness.

L. NELSON BELL

Sniffing, Stirring, Filling, Fanning

A colorful report carried recently by Ecumenical Press Service opens thus: “A concerted, well-financed campaign against sex education in the public schools is being pursued by ‘far right’ organizations in the United States. They are the same extremist groups that in other years have taken as their targets the United Nations, the National Council of Churches, the U. S. Supreme Court and the income tax” (is nothing sacred?).

Dr. Franklin Littell, chairman of the Institute for American Democracy, it continues, thinks the “right-wing extremists,” some of them baptized Christians, work conspiratorially like the early Nazis, misuse Christian terminology, and under the John Birch flag work “to destroy the ecumenical movement, to polarize opinion and to divert funds away from Christian causes.” All this, mark you, in the context of defending sex education. But EPS assures us all is not lost: “Here and there Protestant denominations and councils of churches are beginning to fight back.” (Other worms presumably are still not turning). NCC sympathizers are cited, one source saying that the extremists’ campaign “comes close to a religious heresy” (a word rarely heard in an ecumenical context).

The same source provides a stunner, for it has the extremists “sniffing out issues which will stir emotions and fill their coffers as they fan the fires.” And if that outrageous image doesn’t rouse the customers, “a number of steps are suggested to obtain community action” against extremists in their midst. Those menacing overtones of something-with-boiling-oil-in-it reminded me of the non-right-wing theologian who was convinced the Coming Great Church would be a persecuting one.

All this glib talk of “extremists” (who, after all, come in different shapes and sizes), got me imagining a future news item: “Outside Bethany Church last night a mob of ecumenical extremists ran amok and tried to disrupt a gathering of non-unionists. ‘We don’t object to togetherness,’ one breathless picket told our reporter, ‘but they didn’t clear it first with Head Office.’ Holding tastefully designed placards with extremist slogans (GIVE SEX A CHANCE and VOTE FOR EUGENIUS IV), demonstrators rendered hoarse snatches from a catholic repertoire of songs. Identified were ‘There’s No Place Like Rome,’ and that show-stopper from the steppes, ‘The Dream of Nikodim,’ with its haunting refrain, ‘Comrades All.’”

Thoroughly frightened, I decided that despite its friends and selective reporting I was for sex education after all.

EUTYCHUS IV

Genius And The Gospel

I was encouraged by “The Genius of Charles Haddon Spurgeon” (Feb. 27). I have found his writings and sermons to be very inspirational and meaty. His style of proclamation is simple, direct, and penetrating. Much proclamation of the Gospel is loaded with non-biblical baggage which confuses the hearer in responding to the Holy Spirit’s prodding.… We must realize that in preaching the Gospel, we must speak with simpleness, directness, and with parables that penetrate the heart of modern sinful man.

JAMES ARN

Apostolic Mennonite Church

Trenton, Ohio

One cannot help feeling Mr. Pitts hasn’t quite gotten to the heart of Charles Spurgeon’s genius. Professor Latourette’s statement that he was a “moderate Calvinist” is at best misleading. In his autobiography Spurgeon declares:

I have my own private opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach what is nowadays called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else. I do not believe we can preach the gospel … unless we preach the sovereignty of God in His dispensation of grace; nor unless we exalt the electing, unchangeable, eternal, immutable, conquering love of Jehovah; nor do I think we can preach the gospel unless we base it upon the special and particular redemption of His elect and chosen people which Christ wrought out upon the Cross; nor can I comprehend a gospel which lets saints fall away after they are called [see The Forgotten Spurgeon, by Ian Murray, Banner of Truth Trust].

Spurgeon’s genius lay in his fervent preaching of the Gospel of sovereign grace, which the Holy Spirit used to convert thousands. We should conclude that our unchanging God will continue to bless that proclamation in the seventies.

DONALD M. POUNDSTONE

Sewickley, Pa.

The Devil In Eden

What! Conservation is at last creeping into Christianity (“Fulfilling God’s Cultural Mandate,” Feb. 27)? Over the years I’ve found church-related civic-improvement groups to be the most difficult prospects when attempting to sell the case for our diminishing environment. “This Is My Father’s World” may be sung in our halls of worship, but the words always fail their most salient purpose. The best prepared and most skillfully presented sermons on stewardship so seldom focus beyond the collection plate. Any feeling of responsibility by the modern Christian for that great garden of Eden known as the environment is left to Satan for nurture. Congratulations for getting into the act.

JOHN E. MUDGE

Professor of Biology

Farmington State College

Farmington, Me.

Most of my life I have heard the agitators moan about man destroying himself, his neighbor, or his planet. First it was the bomb, then fallout, most recently the Viet Nam war, and now pollution. It seems clear to me that there are always ulterior motives in these crusades. And it is also clear that the present crusade is not to provide a better environment for our people but stricter controls on industry through government intervention, clearing the way for eventual confiscation of the means of production by government. So it is not hard to identify who and what is really behind the new campaign. The subversive editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY will one day be held accountable for their part in leading man away from God and into slavery.

JOHN D. SOWERS

Birmingham, Mich.

Lutherans’ Lent

I challenge your use of the word some in your editorial, “The Lenten Season” (Feb. 13): “… Lent, a period long observed by Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches as well as Anglican and some Lutheran churches.” I don’t want to be a nit-picker, but does anyone really know of a Lutheran church in which Lent is not observed? Beginning on Ash Wednesday, my Missouri Synod congregation holds special services each Wednesday until Maundy Thursday, when Holy Communion is celebrated. Lutherans of other synods have similar observances. Lent is vital to any church following the liturgical calendar.

LEO L. RIDDLE

Spruce Pine, N. C.

Theology’S Day In Court

In “Church Property Rights” (Feb. 13) you applaud a Supreme Court decision that civil courts lack competence theologically.… American courts have rendered bad decisions in matters where theology and church polity have been involved, but to take these matters out of their hands is not to handle church property cases like any others, for in other cases the courts do (or should) take into account the significant intentions of donors. If they cannot take into account the religious intentions of donors to religious causes they are utterly incapable of granting justice.…

For example, what if a donor leaves an endowment to uphold the teaching of the Westminster Standards and the trustees, as soon as they get this money into their power, divert it to the Black Muslims, the Black Panthers, to Mrs. O’Hair’s atheistical church, or to some other cause to which the donor is heartily opposed. The trustees could claim this to be a theological matter in which the courts have no competence. Courts have made bad decisions, but they should not fail to judge when justice requires it. If they make faulty judgments the wronged parties should endure it and pray and strive for more righteous courts.…

I agree with your implied suggestion that donors to churches and religious endowments should seek as best they can to insure that what they give will not soon fall into the hands of corrupt or careless trustees who will use it against the intentions of the donors.

STEPHEN M. REYNOLDS

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Wenham, Mass.

Listening To Mcluhan

I pounced upon “McLuhan on Religion” (Feb. 13), very impressed that my first issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY had reported him and that one portion of the evangelical world had been listening to him.…

But he does require careful listening. Even a small transposition of letters can alter his meaning.…

You made either a significant typographical error or one of misunderstanding in your paraphrase of McLuhan: “Radical theology … is in keeping with the current age’s shift from concept to precept.” Precept is no shift; McLuhan’s thesis is that we now deal in the world of percept. The new electric technology with its instant speeds have brought this to be. The young are tired of concepts; they want to feel, to experience, to be. The rational logic of doctrinal concepts must be supplemented with perceived experience—faith at work.

You also missed an important meaning when you quoted him as saying that when Christianity “becomes environmental it loses that inner face necessary for the transforming power, that resonance that occurs between the little minority and the great big dark ground.” McLuhan said “interface.” He talks much of the interval, the disjunction between things which creates resonance. This space is what he refers to in the gap a dropout sets up between himself and something else.…

I also think that McLuhan’s contention that “we are moving into a very religious age” is not “seemingly contradictory,” as you suggest, with his view of the demise of Christianity. Many of the under-thirties are indeed on an “inner trip” in search of spiritual reality; they are not looking for it within institutional Christianity. Genuine personal religion is on the upswing; the institutional brand—by whatever name—is being bypassed.

EUNICE SCHATZ

Urban Research Corporation

Chicago, Ill.

Force Confused

Your January 30 editorial entitled “Force: A Christian Option?” is confusing. It begins by charging that “in the World Council of Churches … there have repeatedly been calls for revolution, for the use of force to alter structures of society that will not yield peacefully.”

You go on to list several examples of violent change which (from your perspective) turned out badly. Do you also suggest that Christians (on both sides of the battleline) were wrong in opposing Hitler with violence? Or that the violence which gave birth to the American state was a mistake?

Unless your answer to those questions is an unqualified “No,” I would say your position is essentially the same as that of the World Council.…

Let me share the following from a statement adopted by the 1968 Uppsala Assembly of the WCC:

The building of political structures suitable to national development involves revolutionary changes in social structures. Revolution is not to be identified with violence however. In countries where the ruling groups are oppressive or indifferent to the aspirations of the people, are often supported by foreign interests, and seek to resist all changes by the use of coercive or violent measures, including the “law and order” which may itself be a form of violence, the revolutionary change may take a violent form. Such changes are morally ambiguous. The churches have a special contribution towards the development of effective non-violent strategies of revolution and social change.…

Finally, there is the confusion which results from your apparent equation of revolution, force, and violence. You don’t give us your definitions of those words. Toward the end of the editorial you point out that there is another kind of force (“spiritual power”), but that is certainly not the earlier connotation. Your prior usage, in assigning blame to the World Council, suggests that by force you mean physical force, by revolution you mean violent revolution.

CHARLES P. LUTZ

Associate Executive Secretary

U. S. Conference for the World Council of Churches

New York, N. Y.

A Highly Readable Translation

The New English Bible: The Old Testament (Oxford and Cambridge, 1970, 1,366 pp., $8.95 for Library Edition), is reviewed by Charles F. Pfeiffer, professor of ancient literatures, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

Since the publication of the New English Bible New Testament in 1951, Bible students have been awaiting the Old Testament with keen anticipation. The New Testament was given a generally favorable reception, and American Christians who were less than enthusiastic about the Revised Standard Version thought that this might be a more acceptable translation.

The New English Bible is published jointly by the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge. The American edition is printed here. Representatives of nine religious bodies in the British Isles, including the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, planned and directed the work. The British and Foreign Bible Society and the National Bible Society of Scotland were represented also. During the later stages of translation observers from the Roman Catholic Church joined the committee. The obvious intent of the committee was to produce a Bible translation that would gain wide acceptance throughout the English-speaking world.

Unlike the Revised Standard Version and its predecessors (including the King James Version), the New English Bible professes to be a wholly new translation, rather than a revision of earlier versions. Of course the translators were aware of other versions, and occasionally used them in their search for the best means of rendering the original languages into English. They did not, however, feel any obligation to follow precedent or to justify departures from it. The New English Bible must be evaluated on the basis of its claim that it faithfully renders the original texts into contemporary English.

At times the translators use a simplified English. For Exodus 20:7 they offer, “You shall not make wrong use of the name of the Lord your God”; here and elsewhere they avoid expressions that, although well known to habitual Bible readers, might puzzle the biblically illiterate. In Jonah 1:7 the sailors cast lots to determine who was to blame for their “bad luck.” They did not know the God of Jonah, though we suspect that “bad luck” had more of a religious overtone in ancient times than it does to a modern. The traditional “virtuous woman” (Prov. 31:10, KJV) became the “good wife” in the RSV. In the NEB she is the “capable wife,” a term used in 1965 by R. B. Y. Scott in his Anchor Bible translation. The Hebraist is tempted to throw up his hands and exclaim, “No translation can do justice to the original.” He is right, but the translator must continue to try to find the most suitable English words.

The “garments of skin” made by God for Adam (Gen. 3:21, RSV) become “tunics of skin” in the New English Bible. On the other hand, the “begats” of Genesis 5, which the RSV rendered “was the father of,” have become “begot” in the NEB, a usage that dates to the Jewish Publication Society translation of 1916. The “meat offering” of Leviticus 6 in the King James Version became “meal offering” to the revisers of 1881 and 1901. The Revised Standard used the rather quaint expression “cereal offering”—excellent for the classically trained reader but wholly misleading to Johnny over his Post Toasties. The New English Bible gives us “grain offering,” not very clear, but at least not misleading.

Passages dealing with sex continue to test the ingenuity of the translators. The traditional “Adam knew his wife” (Gen. 4:1, KJV, RSV)—incidentally, a literal translation of the Hebrew—becomes “the man lay with his wife” in the NEB. In the laws pertaining to incest (Lev. 18) the idiom traditionally, and literally, rendered “uncover the nakedness of” becomes “have intercourse with.”

In an attempt to indicate the patronymic as one word or expression, such a name as “Joshua the son of Nun” becomes “Joshua son of Nun” (Josh. 1:1) in the NEB, as in the Jerusalem Bible. The next, and logical, step will be to make it a full proper name and translate, “Joshua ben Nun.”

Since British English and American English are not always uniform, the American reader will occasionally be puzzled. For instance, where the American RSV spoke of “grain in Egypt” (Gen. 42), the New English Bible, like the old King James, says “corn in Egypt.”

The translators were free to paraphrase where they felt this was appropriate. Genesis 6:3, rendered in the RSV “My spirit shall not abide in man forever,” becomes in the NEB “My life-giving spirit shall not remain in man for ever.” Conjectural emendation is an accepted principle. Where the translators feel that the text does not make good sense as it stands, they alter it to provide a meaningful translation. Thus Genesis 9:26 reads, “Bless, O Lord, the tents of Shem …,” with a footnote stating that the Hebrew reads, “Blessed is the Lord, the God of Shem.” As a matter of style, the use of “Once upon a time …” (Gen. 11:1) conveys the idea that the translators regard the story (in this instance, the tower of Babel) as a legend or fairy tale.

The first words of the New English Bible suggest its departure from traditional usages: “In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void … (Gen. 1:1). Hebraists have long suggested that the first word of the Bible is grammatically in the construct state. It is so construed in the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the Torah (1962) and by Ephraim Speiser in the Anchor Bible. In 1951, Alexander Heidel in his The Babylonian Genesis spent six pages attempting to defend the traditional reading.

Those who criticized the RSV for its treatment of Christological passages in the Old Testament will find little comfort in the New English Bible. The much debated Isaiah 7:14 reads in the NEB, “A young woman is with child.” Interestingly, the Jerusalem Bible, published under Roman Catholic auspices, reads, “The maiden is with child.” A footnote in the Jerusalem Bible states that the Greek version reads “the virgin,” being more explicit than the Hebrew. The NEB gives no footnote. Where the passage is quoted in Matthew 1:23, it is rendered, “The virgin will conceive and bear a son and he shall be called Emmanuel.”

Psalm 2:12, rendered in the KJV “Kiss the Son” and in the RSV “Kiss his feet,” becomes in the NEB, “… kiss the king, lest the Lord be angry and you are struck down in mid course, for his anger flares up in a moment.” A footnote suggests that a literal rendering would be, “tremble and kiss the mighty one,” with the further comment “Heb. obscure.” All will agree that this is a very difficult passage to any translator.

Psalm 45:6 was rendered in the KJV, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.…” The RSV reads, “Your divine throne endures for ever and ever.…” In the NEB we read, “Your throne is like God’s throne, eternal.” In the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah (52:13 ff.), the NEB reads “Time was when many were aghast at you, my people.…” The “my people” is not in the Hebrew, and is added by the translators to clarify the text in line with their presuppositions.

The familiar Tweny-third Psalm has traditionally ended, “and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever” (so RSV). The Hebrew idiom, literally “to length of days,” is rendered in the NEB “my whole life long.” The translators presuppose that the assurances of God’s presence and blessing in the psalm relate to this life, with no intimations of the next.

Another interesting deviation from custom is omitting the headings that form all or part of verse one of the Hebrew text of many of the psalms, and these were inserted under the psalm number and before the text in earlier versions. While certainly not a part of the original texts, these headings have a history not only as part of the traditional, Masoretic text, but in translations going back to the Septuagint—probably the second century before Christ. The five “books” of psalms are indicated in the NEB.

If headings have been dropped from Psalms, they have been added through most of the rest of the Bible. Unlike the small-print chapter summaries in some editions of the King James Bible, these headings are in large type so that they stand out. The reader should remember that they are editorial insertions, but with that in mind he should find them useful. Before Isaiah 1:1, for example, is the heading “Judah arraigned.” The next heading precedes Isaiah 6:1 and reads, “The call of Isaiah.”

At times the New English Bible is surprisingly conservative. The sacred name of Israel’s God is not Yahweh, as in the Jerusalem Bible and most contemporary scholarly literature, but “the Lord,” as in the King James and Revised Standard versions. The Israelites cross the Red Sea in the NEB, not the Sea of Reeds of the Jerusalem Bible and the JPS Torah. Although, as we have seen, the first words of Genesis 1 depart from traditional usage, “without form and void” are retained as in the King James. The reviewer would prefer something like “formless and empty,” since the six days that follow describe the process of giving form to the formless and filling the empty earth, heavens, and seas. The NEB translators use “thou” and “thee” in contexts in which the deity is addressed. In the New Testament, however, Jesus is addressed as “you.”

Changes in the second edition of the New English Bible New Testament are relatively few, and those largely matters of refining the English style. The spirit and style of the first edition are carried into the second.

In the New English Bible American Christians have one more translation to use in their studies and consider for pulpit or teaching purposes. The NEB should stimulate Bible study, and it will often bring to the layman ideas that have been discussed in scholarly circles for years but have not been available in a readable Bible translation before. We do not expect the New English Bible to gain universal acceptance, and this fact may enable contemporary Christians to consider it without emotional involvement. Like all other translations, it has its strengths and its weaknesses. It is a highly readable translation, made by excellent scholars. Unhappily, brilliant scholars sometimes let their brilliance eclipse the intent of the original writers. This is true of every translation. The New English translators attempted to render faithfully the text of the biblical books. Occasionally they missed, but on the whole the translation merits serious study.

The New English Bible is available in a variety of editions. The Library Edition has three volumes: Old Testament ($8.95); Apocrypha ($4.95); and New Testament (Second Edition) ($5.95). There is also a standard edition of Old Testament and New Testament ($8.95), and one of the Old Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament ($9.95). The New Testament (Second Edition) is also available as a paperback at $1.75.

The Oxford and Cambridge presses have produced a truly beautiful edition of the Bible. They used a one-column page, departing from the two-column format of earlier editions, including the Revised Standard Version. The traditional verse numbers have been placed in the margin for reference, but they do not break the text itself. In a few places the editors have rearranged the text in accord with their scholarly presuppositions. An extreme example is Zechariah where we find the order: 4:1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14; 3:1–10; 4:4–10. The editors feel they have restored the correct order, but they keep the traditional chapter and verse numbers. Type is large and clear, and poetry is indicated by marginal indentation. The publishers wanted to produce a readable Bible, and they have succeeded.

Thought-Provoking Study

The Prophets, by Emil G. Kraeling (Rand McNally, 1969, 304 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Ronald Youngblood, associate professor of Old Testament interpretation, Bethel Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota.

As in the book of the same title by a contemporary Jewish scholar, Abraham Heschel, Professor Kraeling discusses the basic teachings and unique contributions of the Old Testament prophetic literature (Isaiah through Malachi) in what he considers to be chronological order. Whereas Heschel, however, stops at the exile, Kraeling carries the story down to the end of the Old Testament account, though he gives only a passing nod (to keep the cost down, his foreword tells us) to lesser known or less significant prophets. His “Trito-Isaiah” (Isaiah 56–66), for example, receives but two pages of description, whereas “Deutero-Isaiah” (Isaiah 40–55) merits thirty-seven pages.

Kraeling is at his best when he finds extra-biblical ancient Near Eastern parallels to shed light on Old Testament passages. A lifetime of teaching and scholarship in the Bible and related areas enables him to bring to bear on the text of Scripture a wide array of stimulating and helpful observations. As a Lutheran minister, Kraeling is quick to point out it was the Church that ultimately extended the knowledge and influence of the prophets far beyond the circles of the Jewish ghettos and that the New Testament writers often displayed a remarkably profound understanding of Old Testament prophetic statements. He emphasizes also that later meaning attributed to words and phrases often become more theologically significant than the originally intended meaning. A corollary is the worthwhile comment, made also by Gerhard von Rad and others, that unfulfilled prophecy is not necessarily false prophecy: “God acts in sovereign freedom, and can adopt a different course if circ*mstances warrant.”

In his discussion of the prophetic consciousness, Kraeling notes correctly that attempts to psychoanalyze the prophets cannot be expected to produce fruitful results, since “the remoteness of the times and the uncertainty and incompleteness of the reporting are formidable barriers. The tests and interrogations that can be applied to living persons cannot be applied to the prophets.” One wishes that the author had used this admirable warning to temper his own skepticism about the kinds of insights that the prophets could or could not have received from their sovereign God. Kraeling freely admits that many of the prophets possessed capacities for clairvoyance, but he rarely if ever allows them the ability to foretell the future and nearly always denies that they could have foreseen specific details. This and similar considerations lead him to suspect the authenticity of numerous passages, frequently assume later interpolations, and fragmentize even the shorter books and pericopes. The snowballing effect of such an approach leads to a belittling of the unity and credibility of the Scriptures to the extent that at one point the reliability of the Gospels bows to that of Josephus.

On balance, however, The Prophets is a discerning and thought-provoking volume, and the reader equipped to separate fact from speculation will learn much from it. Kraeling’s treatment of the four Servant Songs of Isaiah, though necessarily brief and therefore somewhat truncated, was for me one of the highlights of the book. Isaiah 53, says our author, “was the trellis on which the vine of Christian dogma could climb. And who will say that it was not the will of God that it should do so?”

Who, indeed?

A Plea For Obedience

God’s Basic Law, by Kurt Hennig (Fortress. 1969, 242 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by John C. Howell, professor of Christian ethics, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri.

In a day when adherence to the moral authority of biblical faith is constantly challenged as “legalism” by situationally oriented Christian ethicists, it is refreshing to read a book declaring that responsiveness to God’s mandates is the essence of true morality. Kurt Hennig, a Lutheran pastor in Stuttgart, Germany, provides such a resource in his study of the Ten Commandments as God’s Basic Law.

Much in this book is valuable as Christian guidance. Hennig’s thesis is that man’s basic failure in moral living is his unwillingness to yield his life in obedience to God. The contemporary importance of the Ten Commandments, therefore, is grounded upon the realization that “they do not call us to morality but to something much more important—to obedience.” The Decalogue is not a compendium of ethical universals that all reasonable men should agree to accept; it is, rather, “God’s call to obedience, for in them it is God himself who speaks.”

Each chapter of the book is devoted to one of the commandments, and Hennig usually relates the Old Testament command to its application in the New Testament. He also gives adequate stress to God’s mercy toward the disobedient as a balance to his emphasis upon unconditional obedience.

On the negative side: Hennig uses the commandments as a vehicle for introducing ethical concerns that are only indirectly suggested by the Exodus passages, and some one-sided affirmations.

In discussing the fourth commandment, for instance, he maintains that the disintegration of the family began when “the emancipation of women and equal rights for women were proclaimed and established,” because man’s headship over woman was thus destroyed and respect in the home lost. It is undeniably true that the greater freedom of women has altered the structure of family life, but Hennig gives no hint of the values gained in marriage by accepting the equality of personhood (Gal. 3:28) as a basis for family living.

Similarly, he declares that “no child is born apart from the express will of God.” Since procreation can occur only because God created man to reproduce himself in this way, the statement is partially true; but to declare that every act of conception is God’s express will is absurd.

Such affirmations as these tend to diminish the impact of his many very helpful interpretations of the contemporary relevance of the Ten Commandments. His basic plea for obedience is needed, but the book requires selective reading.

Book Briefs

Listen to Me!, by Gladys Hunt (Inter-Varsity, 1969, 165 pp., $3.50). The author introduces the reader to eight students, representing varied backgrounds and ideologies, who talk about their ideas on “the real stuff of life.”

The Right to Live, by Clifford C. Cawley (A. S. Barnes, 1969, 303 pp., $10). Investigates the legal problems created when a parent, because of his religious convictions, denies a child proper medical aid.

Our God-Breathed Book—the Bible, by John R. Rice (Sword of the Lord, 1969, 416 pp., $5.95). Although this defense of the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture breaks no new ground, it serves as a useful summary of the views of a number of conservative scholars. There is an emphasis upon God’s control of the environment and character of the human authors so that the words they wrote were actually God’s words.

The Rebellions of Israel, by Andrew C. Tunyogi (John Knox, 1969, 158 pp., $4.95). Studies the rebellion-forgiveness motif in the history of Israel and considers its significance for the new Israel.

The Redeeming Christ, by Peter J. Riga (Corpus, 1969, 124 pp., $4.95). A Roman Catholic theologian affirms the fact of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead as the central event of Christian history.

Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Volume 32:1886, by C. H. Spurgeon (Banner of Truth Trust, 1969, 708 pp., 25s). A reproduction of one of the later volumes in this classic series of Spurgeon’s sermons.

Melanchthon, Reformer Without Honor, by Michael Rogness (Augsburg, 1969, 165 pp., $4.95). Investigates the role of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s most important co-worker, in the formation of Lutheran theology.

The Letter of Paul to the Galatians, by Robert L. Johnson (Sweet, 1969, 182 pp., $3.50). Latest addition to a series of evangelical commentaries written by Church of Christ scholars and based on the RSV Bible.

Know What You Believe, by Paul E. Little (Scripture Press, 1970, 192 pp., paperback, $1.25). A brief but most helpful survey of the main areas of Christian doctrine.

Prayer Is Action, by Helen Smith Shoemaker (Morehouse-Barlow, 1969, 128 pp., paperback, $3). The widow of Dr. Sam Shoemaker contends that prayer itself is the most effective form of Christian action.

Why Do Christians Suffer?, by Theodore H. Epp (Back to the Bible, 1970, 135 pp., paperback, $.50). Some helpful thoughts on a timeless subject.

Defrost Your Frozen Assets, by C. W. Franke (Word, 1969, 147 pp., $3.95) Explores ways in which Christians can put their faith into action by using their God-given abilities and potential to meet the world’s needs.

Miracle of Time, by Eric W. Hayden (Zondervan, 1969, 123 pp., $2.95) Lenten sermons by the former pastor of London’s Metropolitan Tabernacle.

Praise him with fanfares on the trumpet, praise him upon lute and harp; praise him with tambourines and dancing, praise him with flute and strings; praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with truimphant cymbals; let everything that has breath the praise Lord!

—Psalms 150:3–6

(The New English Bible)

Many a Christian musician has suddenly decided to take the psalmist’s inspired imperatives very literally. Strange new sounds—most of them very loud—will emanate from sanctuaries around the world this Easter Sunday. They add up to the first significantly new movement in church music in more than a century.

Evangelical churches have taken the lead in introducing a new kind of sacred music patterned after the popular folk rock. Country or Western music is also being appropriated by evangelical churches more than ever. Theologically liberal churches have been more reticent about such musical inroads, but in those congregations that allow it, these types of music as well as straight jazz are now heard. Most common are the folk and jazz “masses.”

Interestingly, the new movement is being welcomed by many respected church musicians, even those who have until now insisted upon classical forms. Others are critical. Church-music journals have generally been sympathetic, though they are publishing hot dialogues on the pros and cons.

“The Church is groping now for a new musical language,” says Dr. Donald Hustad, professor of church music at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “At the moment we go with the latest fad.” Hustad regards the current trend as secular music’s biggest invasion of the Church since about 1850.

As might be expected, the new sounds in church music are seen as symbols of liberation and are used enthusiastically by young people. They are sung at youth meetings in the church, at outings, retreats, and rallies. But soloists and instrumentalists are also being heard exercising the fresh idiom in worship services—sometimes with amplifiers perched on the altars.

Folk rock has caused a boom in so-called all-night sings, which have been popular for many years, especially in the Southern United States. These programs normally feature several quartets. Admission is charged, and the musicians bring along a supply of records to sell, too.

One such sing brought people flocking to Toronto’s Massey Hall last month and enabled a local reporter to twit fundamentalists. He recalled their aversion to nightclubs, then noted the atmosphere at the sing: “The darkened house with the sweeping spotlight, electronic sound equipment that blasted the music out into the auditorium until it bounced off the walls, and men and women in the audience wearing the latest styles. All that was missing were the scantily dressed showgirls and fast-talking MC with his blue jokes.”

Among Southern Baptists and Methodists, this phenomenon has thwarted the efforts of the musical elite to get local choirs and congregations to use more sophisticated music (represented in the older tradition by Bach and in modern style by such contemporary composers as the late Leo Sowerby of Washington Cathedral). Efforts to bring about such a switch are being temporarily abandoned as folk rock makes headway in the churches.

Says one authority: “Current religious music in folk rock style is generally superior to the cheap nineteenth-century gospel songs that were inspired by the sentimental ballads of that day.” The comparison comes from Dr. Paul E. Elbin, a United Presbyterian minister who is president of West Liberty State College in Wheeling, West Virginia. Elbin, writing in the Hymn, adds that “the simplicity and honesty of many folk-derived religious compositions surely make them more acceptable to men of good taste and religious devotion than the erotic ‘In the Garden’ and similar musical aberrations of the past.”

Another expert, writing from the Roman Catholic perspective in Music, took an opposite tack: “Historians and sociologists cannot but be aware that the worst kind of pseudo-popular ‘commercial’ music is threatening to invade the Mass. Guitar, rock ’n roll, and jazz Masses do not represent the actuosa participatio envisaged by the [Vatican] Council. The music not only lacks the devotional quality but also the particular grace of art, because it gives us in the raw those cultural traits that were not influenced by Christian ethics.”

Austin Lovelace, writing in the Journal of Church Music, declared that “as an organist I find it hard to get excited about giving up the glorious sound of a good pipe organ for the strumming of guitars. I believe every instrument has its usefulness, but the guitar (limited mostly to rhythm and harmony) seriously limits music possibilities.” He thinks many of the new songs have a message but are so commercial in both text and music “that they are bound to be ephemeral.”

Tedd Smith, veteran pianist for Billy Graham crusades, is a conscientious promoter of sacred rock. “It is not just noise, as so many people think,” he says. “It is a difficult, extremely complicated kind of music.” Not everything that is labeled rock has musical integrity, and Smith suggests that the best is that which comes out of Christian experience. This, he contends, is deeply meaningful for many of today’s young people and is not mere entertainment.

Jazz in the churches goes back a decade or more. It has come on slowly, but with the encouragement of such renowned figures as Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, both of whom have been composing sacred music in recent years.

Sample of new sacred song.

Composer Ralph Carmichael says,

“I want neither credit

nor blame for creating today’s

musical forms. I ask only for

guidance to know how to use them

in good taste to reach

‘now’ people with a message

that never changes.”

“The Singing Nun” introduced the folk element into sacred music several years ago. Touring college groups¹Breakthroughs have been encouraged through wide popular acceptance of groups such as those from Oral Roberts University and Campus Crusade, as well as Moral Rearmament’s “Up with People” performers. Some of these have drawn criticism from fundamentalists for their choreography. have done much to help religious folk music catch on. Actually, however, folk tunes have been giving way to so-called hard or acid rock, or to combinations of folk and rock.

The use of instruments is not new to many evangelical churches. Many have always had an assortment playing along with the singing congregations.

A few evangelicals consider rock demonically inspired. Professional musicians tend to agree, however, that music cannot be intrinsically good or evil. Yet they concede that various types of music have different effects on the listener. Says Dr. Lee Olson of Nyack Missionary College, “The sensual pleasure derived from listening to music and the physiological effect of rhythms upon the listener can instill a variety of moods.” He feels that rhythm probably has done more for secularization of church music than anything else.

Musical experts note that the Church has always borrowed from the music of the secular world. This was true in Luther’s time, and in Wesley’s, and even in the last century, when many of today’s gospel songs were inspired by the kind of music written by Stephen Foster.

So far, congregational singing has not been much affected by folk rock. It normally takes a long time for new songs to get published in the standard hymnals. A number of new hymnals and supplements are now being planned, and these probably will reflect the current trend.

The hope of the best church musicians, similar to that of other Christian artists, is that perhaps in the current changing mood a distinctively evangelical music can be developed. Olson would like to see “a sanctified church music which is not of this world and through which the Christian will sense the glory of the world to come.” He quotes Olivier Messiaen, one of France’s leading contemporary church musicians, as saying that to accomplish this the Church needs “a consummate artist … who will be both a skilled artisan and a fervent Christian. Let us hasten in our prayers for such a liberator.”

DAVID E. KUCHARSKY

Abortion Made Easier

It’s not for us to say, some state legislators seem to be saying about whether they should legalize abortions. Last month Hawaii abolished all requirements for abortions save a ninety-day residency period and fetal nonviability. Despite strong opposition from his church, Roman Catholic Governor John A. Burns indicated he would allow the bill to become law.

Meanwhile, in a Maryland House committee, Allen B. Spector was sponsoring a similar abortion bill. “Brain surgery is more dangerous,” the delegate observed. “Yet as far as this legislature is concerned, it can be performed on a kitchen table.” Religious considerations, he added, should be the concern of the individuals involved and of the religious community, not the state legislature.

A physician reminded the committee that his profession has long regulated itself and can establish guidelines for abortion.

Abortion laws also made news in:

• Virginia. A liberalized bill got a majority of votes in the lower house.

• California. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a state court’s declaration that the law allowing abortion only to preserve the woman’s life was unconstitutionally vague.

• New York. The State Council of Churches declared abortion “properly a matter of individual conscience” and called only for “medical safeguards in a hospital setting.”

• Washington. Either liberalize the present law or refer it to a popular vote, the State Council of Churches challenged legislators. A Gallup Poll last December showed that perhaps 40 per cent of the voters would favor legalized abortion.

Personalia

Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, currently editor-at-large of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, has been named professor of theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has been a visiting professor there since last September.

Dr. Donald R. Heiges resigned his dual post as president of the Lutheran seminaries in Philadelphia and Gettysburg. He announced he was leaving less than two weeks after a decision to drop plans for merging the seminaries.

Officials of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod have blocked an attempt to appoint Dr. Richard Jungkuntz to the faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Jungkuntz has been a visiting professor at Concordia since he lost his job as executive secretary of the synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations. Concordia’s Board of Control wanted to take him on as associate professor of exegetical-systematic theology.

Bob Wilcox, 26, who has been religion editor of the Miami News for one year, won the annual Supple Award of the Religion Newswriters Association this month for excellence in religion reporting in the secular press. Entries of Janice Law, 27, of the Houston Chronicle won the new RNA Schachern Award for the best religion section in newspapers published in 1969. Hiley Ward of the Detroit Free Press was elected president of the RNA at its annual meeting.

Dr. Mariano di Gangi was elected president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Di Gangi is a former pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, where he succeeded the noted Donald Grey Barnhouse. Di Gangi is now director of the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship.

The Reverend Andrew Young, a close associate of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will run for the U.S. congressional seat now held by Representative Fletcher Thompson of Atlanta, a conservative Republican. Young, who said he would resign this month as executive vice-president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is also opposed by candidate Lonnie King, president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP.

Deaths

ALBERT BUCKNER COE, 81, retired Congregationalist leader; former chief architect of the United Church of Christ and one-time president of the Massachusetts Council of Churches; in Columbus, Ohio.

ERNEST S. REED, 61, official of the Canadian Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches; Anglican bishop of Ottawa; in Ottawa, Canada.

THE RT. REV. ERNEST SAMUEL REED, 61, Anglican bishop of Ottawa and member of the World Council of Churches’ Central and Executive committees; in Ottawa.

Religion In Transit

The Department of Commerce released figures showing that church construction in the United States in 1969 was about $951 million, down from 1968’s figure of $1.3 billion.

The Presbyterian Ministers’ Fund has registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission a mutual growth fund to be known as Harvest Fund. Sale of shares will begin in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

A grant of $220,000 has been allocated to the Interreligious Foundation for Community Development (IFCO) by the United Methodist Board of Missions; one-third of this sum is undesignated, the second such undesignated allotment made by the board since October, when $300,000 was granted with no strings.

Methodist minister Phillip Lawson testified to the House Committee on Internal Security that the Methodist Innercity Parish in Kansas City had rented a building to Black Panthers for their headquarters for $1 a year.

United Methodist mission magazine World Outlook has been merged with new, the multi-media communications package of the United Presbyterian Church, to form new/World Outlook.

Capetown, South Africa, churchmen who support apartheid were disturbed when a study commission they appointed told them racially mixed marriages were not sinful, the Associated Press reported.

The Pocket Testament League plans to distribute 500,000 Gospels of John (in fifteen languages) to visitors at Expo 70, the world fair in Japan.

The United Church of Canada expects a $1 million deficit in its operating budget this year and may be forced to abandon some of its programs.

The London (England) Bible College has opened a new branch of evening classes in Madras, India.

In the most sweeping integration order ever issued against a big school system outside the South, Los Angeles was ordered to integrate its 622 schools with 674,000 students, starting next September. To achieve full integration, elementary and secondary schools in neighboring Pasadena were lumped into four “corridors,” with busing of students planned up to ten miles within each zone. School officials said the busing could cost $1 million a year.

These actions illustrate a new dimension to the intensifying national school crisis. They reveal problems in the North that school districts in the South have been facing for years.

In a number of cities—notably in the South—a strategy used to subvert integration of public schools is the opening of nonsectarian “private” schools. While few of these schools overtly admit it, most become all-white havens for desegregation dodgers.

In the Jackson, Mississippi, area, for instance, the White Citizens Councils of America, a white-supremacy group, estimates nearly 3,000 new students were enrolled in its private schools during the first six weeks of this year. Similar reports come from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

Responsible Christian bodies and associations of Christian schools, though, appear to be heavily opposed to racially segregated private schools.

Dr. John F. Blanchard, Jr., executive director of the National Association of Christian Schools (affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals), spoke in an interview about the association’s 300 member schools. “We will not accept a school whose literature says it is for white children only,” he said. He estimates that two-thirds to four-fifths of the NACS schools (with a total enrollment of 53,000) have at least token integration. The association itself has grown rapidly in the past several years. But Blanchard does not think the upsurge was caused by the desire of parents to circumvent integration. Rather, they are upset over sex-education courses in public schools and are also alarmed about the general secular tone there.

“Parents suddenly are awakened to the fact that secular education—which is education without God—is undermining the faith of their children,” Blanchard believes.

Writer Joe Bayly of David C. Cook publishers, who is president of the NACS board, said the NACS’s policy is to try to determine whether a school applying for membership is founded on Christian principles or merely on segregation or “super-patriotism.” “We want schools that are Christocentric … rather than those that are trying to escape the Supreme Court ruling on a local level or to protest the lack of patriotism within public schools,” he said.

Apparently private “Christian” schools in Dixie are getting the NACS message: only one in Mississippi has become a NACS member in the past three years, Blanchard said.

The National Union of Christian Schools represents 287 elementary and secondary schools in twenty-six states and Canada. About 85 per cent of the pupils’ parents are members of the Christian Reformed Church. Perhaps twenty-five to thirty of the schools are integrated, according to John A. Vander Ark, NUCS director and editor of its magazine, Christian Home and School. Vander Ark said the NUCS urges that “there be no discrimination on the basis of race.” A revamped policy “advising open admissions” is in the works, Vander Ark added. It is in line with the strong stand against discrimination taken by the Christian Reformed Church in 1968.

Speaking about 1,236 elementary (with 154,000 students) and twenty-five community secondary schools related to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Dr. Arthur Miller of the denomination’s Board of Parish Education said: “We would offer no encouragement at all to congregations that would want to start a school to escape integration.… That would do violence to the Christian school concept.”

The denomination adopted a statement at its convention last July stating that the Lutheran school “is not to provide parents an escape from sending their children to racially or culturally integrated schools.” About 640 of the Missouri Synod-related elementary schools are integrated, according to Dr. Martin F. Wessler, the synod’s associate secretary of schools.

In addition to these three major affiliations of Christian schools, there are a number of regional associations and quasi-associations of private schools. One is the Association for Christian Schools, run in Houston by T. Robert Ingram.

Some persons acquainted with the association say it is strongly committed to segregation. Ingram simply says his organization (it has no member schools) has no statement on race: “We don’t concern ourselves with this.… The compulsory school attendance system is unlawful.… Confusion across the country has stimulated interest in the Christian school movement. Those setting up a school should run it as they see fit.”

Ingram expects about one hundred school administrators, teachers, board members, and parents to attend a three-day ACS annual conference in Houston next month. The major concern will be Creation and the public schools.

Most denominations officially oppose school segregation. At the local level, however, makeshift, hastily formed “Christian academies” are springing up. Few if any of these schools bother to affiliate with national organizations like the NACS or the NUCS.

Last January, thirty-six representatives of a black Catholic parish in Indianola, Mississippi, picketed a white sister church that had sold its old building to be used for a new, presumably all-white private school. Asked if the private school was being established to avoid integration, the white minister of the black church replied, “That’s right.” The pastor of the white parish declined to reply.

In Tunica, Mississippi, Protestants have established private schools “to circumvent federal court integration orders,” reports Evangelical Press. Some 350 white children and half of Tunica’s thirty white teachers took their public-school textbooks and crowded into the small rooms of the church schools. (Mississippi law permits the use of public-school books in private schools.)

In the wake of court desegregation orders, Religious News Service noted, sixteen Baptist churches in Mississippi’s Adams County banded to open a private school. The announcement was greeted with more than 2,400 “good faith” applications (each with a $20 deposit) from students who had previously attended public schools.

Nobody seems to know how many “segregation academies” there are, or how fast the movement is expanding. Persons familiar with the situation, like Joe Bayly, say it is a fairly serious problem. But Bayly adds quickly that some all-white Christian schools are “quietly moving toward integration.”

Although he recognizes that havens of segregation exist, Dr. William L. Pressley, headmaster of Atlanta’s prestigious Westminster Schools, advises new schools to start out with an open admission policy. The Westminster Schools—six units for kindergartners through high schoolers—were among the first private schools in the Southeast to take the integration leap. The move, made six years ago, cost them no students, Pressley reports, though a few parents recorded their displeasure. Now black students, who get equal consideration when scholarships are distributed¹Many independent “prep” schools have willingly opened their doors and scholarship funds to Negroes. Notable among such Chirstian schools is the Stony Brook School on Long Island., are considered “constructive” additions to the schools.

One private school due to start in September, 1971, with an open admission policy is Linfield School in southern California. The expensive ($3,100-a-year), non-denominational boarding school for grades seven through twelve will open the doors of its 100-acre campus to blacks, says president and founder Donn C. Odell, “if they qualify.”

Official denominational pressure has been mounting lately to support unified public-school systems and to oppose private schools based on segregation.

In Mississippi, arms of the Episcopal and United Methodist churches have gone on record declaring these principles. So have the editors of two dozen Baptist state papers throughout the nation. And a similiar stand will be proposed for adoption by the national conference of the United Methodists at a meeting in St. Louis next month.

The Mecklenburg Presbytery of the Southern Presbyterian Church has gone a step farther: it instructed member churches in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area “that no private school (grades 1 through 12) in competition with the public school system should be operated by, or housed in, church facilities.”

Segregation in Roman Catholic parochial schools presents problems not unlike those in the Protestant milieu. Opponents of federal aid to education, notably Americans United for Separation of Church and State, fear that government funding of parochial schools will produce a mass exodus from the public education system. This, foes declare, not only will cost taxpayers more; it also will make public schools a dumping ground for minority students while white students transfer to “racist parochial schools.”

In an apparent effort to calm such fears, some Catholic educators have taken recent action to halt the segregation influx in parochial schools. Several Southern dioceses have barred public-school transfer students from entering Catholic schools. In St. Paul, pupils in six Catholic elementary schools have been regrouped by age and bused among four schools in an attempt to end de facto segregation and improve inner-city education.

Nevertheless, many Christian schools will continue to have segregation or only token integration as long as neighborhoods are segregated. And tuition costs of private schools—Christian and otherwise—tend to make them accessible mainly to the economically advantaged. The doors of Christian schools are closed to many minority and lower-class children simply because their parents can’t afford to send them.

Pastoral Pilgrimage

Into the furor of the school desegregation hassle rode seventeen Alabama ministers recently, their jaunt taking them to the Washington offices of a special counsel to President Nixon (Harry Dent) and a Supreme Court justice (Hugo Black), among others.

The ministers’ purpose was: to reflect concern over the growing number of private schools popping up in the South in the wake of federal orders to intensify integration; to reflect feelings of many of their parishioners favoring freedom of choice in the public schools; and to oppose busing of school children.

One of the group’s organizers was Dr. R. B. Culbreth, pastor of Birmingham’s Huffman Baptist Church and former pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D. C. Culbreth once counted among his members South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who helped arrange the appointments for the ministers.

All the ministers making the trip were Southern Baptist except for the Reverend Pete Clifford, a Birmingham United Methodist pastor. The group included the president of the Alabama Baptist Convention.

Ralph Feild, chief organizer of the trip, said: “This administration is in sympathy with the South. It is against forced busing and it is determined to save neighborhood schools.”

The ministers emphasized that they had not gone to Washington as segregationists. And, they insisted, most are convinced that private schools for the masses—such as many Southern churches are being pressed to organize—would be “economically discriminatory.”

Several noted they returned from Washington decidedly anti-(George) Wallace. One observed: “It’s almost impossible for the South to get a wide hearing in Washington because of the antics of Wallace and (Georgia governor Lester) Maddox.”

WALLACE HENLEY

Division = Lutheran Unity?

In a February 11 letter to the pastors and teachers of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, President Jacob A. O. Preus warned of a liberal group within the church disrupting its conservative stand on doctrine. Ten days later, some 850 conservative Lutherans heard a call to divide the church along liberal and evangelical lines.

In his “brother-to-brother” letter, Preus scored “prominent and responsible professors and synodical officials” who have circulated a document, “A Call to Openness and Trust.” The St. Louis-based group asks for greater freedom of belief relating to matters they say are not specifically considered in the Scriptures, including biblical inerrancy and the manner of creation.

“Make no mistake about this, brothers,” Preus admonished. “What is at stake is not only inerrancy but the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself, the authority of Holy Scripture, the ‘quia’ subscription to the Lutheran confessions, and perhaps the very continued existence of Lutheranism as a confessional and confessing movement in the Christian world.”

He concluded: “It would be far better for such people to leave our fellowship than to work from within to torment and ultimately to destroy it.” His message didn’t escape the notice of the keynote speaker at a Chicago testimonial for the Reverend Herman Otten, editor of the Christian News.²The 24,000-circulation, independent tabloid weekly was itself repudiated by the Missouri Synod’s Council of Presidents last year for its alleged divisive influence.

Lutheran layman Roy Guess of Casper, Wyoming, told the 850 guests that the Missouri Synod should (1) recognize and define its evident theological division, (2) outlaw liberal theology in the church, and (3) “amicably and fairly” lay the groundwork so liberals can carry on “as they see fit and we, as conservative Bible-believing Missouri Synod Lutherans, may continue in the traditional and historical faith.… This eventually means organizational realignment. I see no other Christian solution.”

Examining Black Theology

What is the meaning of “blackness” for American life in general, and theological formulation in particular? This was the question posed at the Conference on the Black Religious Experience and Theological Education, held February 20–22 at Howard University, in Washington, D. C.

The assembly had the kind of initial advantage that accrues to black-and-white dialogue when blacks outnumber whites—in this case by three to one. It was assumed that there is a typically black theological lifestyle whose justification is found, not in blackness, but in the relative nearness of its formulators to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

At this point the conference became bifocal. One pole was represented by history professor Vincent Harding of Atlanta’s Spelman College, the other by Professor James H. Cone of Union Seminary, New York. Harding proposed that to articulate a valid “black religious experience” one must bypass the formulations of historic Christianity and return to the “faith of the fathers” in pre-slavery Africa. The basic insights that make this primeval “faith” identifiable shine through the poetry and other non-rational elements of the black Christian community. But the major qualities that belong to a valid black religious experience are those of animism. Black Christianity was held to have been superimposed upon this fundament.

The more traditional posture was that Christianity can be made valid for black experience if we can go behind the tradition of Euro-American (read white) Christendom to the Christ who identified with the poor and was “friend of sinners” rather than “patron of the privileged.” Thus a typically black theology was held to be a necessary ingredient in theological education and, as well, an essential corrective to the distortions of American Christendom.

Blackness was seen as less a genetic matter than a psychological one—namely, an increasing self-consciousness of difference from the Euro-American style in life and religion. At times also blackness was equated with economic disadvantage. This led to a strong implicit element of criticism of all forms of middle-class and upper-class American life. American society was branded as being racist and oppressive to visible minorities.

It was a consensus among whites in attendance that they were on the taking end of “sock it to ‘em”—and the experience was probably salutary. It is always good to be compelled to ask, “Is it I?” Probably some forms of rhetoric and hyperbole are essential to shaking established patterns. Certainly the conference held Robert Burns’s mirror to the eyes of members of the privileged majority. Whether it will merely increase the guilt level or lead to constructive results is for the future to decide.

HAROLD B. KUHN

Money For All-Black Groups: Granting The Separatists?

In a controversy similar to the furor over Episcopal money transmitted indirectly to the Black Economic Development Conference (see September 26, 1969, issue, page 42), a new logomachy has surfaced about United Presbyterian involvement with the militant black agency. The question is whether $50,000 received by the BEDC late last year was “United Presbyterian money” by the time the BEDC got it.

Here’s the background, according to Religious News Service reporter Elliot Wright: The United Presbyterian Board of National Missions and the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations were each directed to give $50,000 to the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization at last May’s UP General Assembly. This money was to be released to IFCO when it had “approved the manner in which the money would be held and administered.”

The mission board was also instructed to “support possibilities recommended to it by IFCO, including those … of the National Black Economic Development Conference.” When IFCO’s board met last September, it agreed to accept the Presbyterian money and channel part of it to the BEDC. In early December, IFCO received the $100,000 and the BEDC got half of that sum the same month.

Ministers’ Social Security

April 15 isn’t only the deadline for clergymen to file their 1969 federal income-tax forms (many will enclose a check); it’s also the last day most of them can request exemption from social security coverage of their earnings from professional services.

Since 1968, earnings of ministers from services in their ministry automatically have been covered for social security purposes. Exemption from this requirement can be obtained only on grounds of conscience or religious principle and a minister who once gets such an exemption cannot later revoke it.

Clergymen electing this exemption must file a completed Internal Revenue Service form 4361 with the IRS by April 15. But the deadline applies only to ministers who had annual earnings in any two years before 1970 of $400 or more from ministerial services. The exemption can’t be applied to wages and self-employment earnings from other sources.

United Presbyterian spokesmen generally say that it was IFCO’s decision—not the denomination’s—to pipe the money to the BEDC, which is closely associated with James Forman’s Black Manifesto. But they add that there was no designation or restriction by the General Assembly that prohibited such action.

The whole involvement came to public light only last month, after a wire story quoted BEDC chairman Calvin Marshall as saying $50,000 had come from United Presbyterians. That money, plus $29,858 from other sources, will be used for the BEDC’s administrative development.

In another funding controversy, officials of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ insisted last month that its $1 million grant to black churchmen did not encourage racial separation. But leaders of the NAACP disagreed in a lengthy standoff debate in Boston.

The UCC voted last November to give the $1 million to the state’s Black Ecumenical Commission (BEC) by 1971; $250,000 was paid to the BEC in January. John Morsell, second in command to NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins, echoed an earlier statement by Wilkins that the church’s decision to fund the black commission was “feeding on despair and misguided guilt” and moving toward “the apostleship of black racism.” Other opponents of the grant included AME Zion bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood.

Morsell told the consultation (boycotted by BEC members) that many national religious bodies have now chosen to abandon efforts toward integration and the goals of a single society.

Among those defending the funding was United Methodist bishop James K. Mathews of New England. He called the grant “an investment in justice and human dignity, preeminent concerns of our day.”

Meanwhile, UCC and NAACP agencies entered a joint operation to break down barriers to fair employment in broadcasting industries and to help minority groups “get access to the airwaves.” The UCC’s director of communications, Dr. Everett C. Parker, was joined by NAACP official Jean Fairfax in a statement announcing the program. It asserted that the Federal Communications Commission was guilty of “a shameful, almost incredible delay” in enforcing its own fair-employment rule for the broadcast media.

A primary effort of the venture will be to get stations to hire and train blacks and other minority persons right away, especially for top management levels. Parker’s office already is participating in citizen-group negotiations with management of twenty-four Atlanta, Georgia, stations.

Tracking Down A Killer

A new killer virus discovered in Nigeria, West Africa, claimed the life of Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) missionary doctor Jeanette M. Troup, 46, of Akron, Ohio, on February 18. Her death came just one year after she had treated and diagnosed the first recorded victims of the virus. Dr. Troup, a Wheaton College alumna who served with the SIM for eighteen years, had been treating African patients suffering from Lassa fever at the SIM hospital in Jos.

The lethal virus first appeared in a missionary from Lassa, Nigeria; hence its name. Both she and the nurse attending her at Evangel Hospital died. Another missionary nurse, Lily Pinneo, came down with the fever and was rushed to the United States. After battling for life—with temperatures as high as 107—she recovered miraculously.

So far no effective vaccine has been found to combat Lassa fever. A number of Africans have died of the disease through the years, but no exact figures are available. Research was being conducted at Yale University, but two investigators there were infected with the virus. One died. The university then abandoned research on the disease, and the investigation has now been shifted to the National Communicable Disease Center at Atlanta.

Late last month Miss Pinneo was well enough (after nine weeks in a New York hospital) to return to Jos. She took with her a small supply of plasma from her blood containing antibodies that doctors in Nigeria hope will counteract this otherwise untreatable infection.

W. HAROLD FULLER

Even an Irishman can’t hit a nose that isn’t there, quipped United Methodist bishop James K. Mathews at the opening press conference of the Consultation on Church Union in St. Louis this month. But now, said the COCU chairman, for the first time the consultation had a nose in front of it, after sixty-one arduous days of work by the Plan of Union Commission. The result of their effort was a 156-page proposal that could unite nine denominations into one church by the end of the decade.¹Participating churches and their membership, according to recent figures, are African Methodist Episcopal, 1.1 million; African Methodist Episcopal Zion, 850,000; Christian (Disciples of Christ), 1.4 million; Christian Methodist Episcopal, 300,000; Episcopal, 3.4 million; Presbyterian Church (U. S.). 965,000: United Church of Christ, 2 million; United Methodist, 10.7 million; and United Presbyterian U.S.A., 3.2 million. Total: about 24 million.

Dr. William A. Benfield, Jr., a Southern Presbyterian pastor from Charleston, West Virginia, with a genial personality and a well-defined nose, pointed to that feature and shot back at Mathews: “Now I know why they chose me to be chairman of the drafting commission.” Later, the 250 delegates, observers, and guests at COCU’s ninth plenary session gave Benfield a standing ovation after he presented the plan of union. The “hitting” started later.

But criticisms and revisions of the plan, which must now be voted on by the participating churches, were relatively mild and minor; preliminary approval of the document proceeded chapter by chapter with few surprises. This could be a testimony to the smooth groundwork laid by COCU planners. Some said it showed apathy for a super denomination that would be obsolete before it was born.

Of the ninety voting delegates (ten from each denomination), sixty-eight were either clergy or full-time church workers. Eight were women, and about half a dozen were youths. Cynics said the older, clerical orientation showed.

By mid-session, at least, there had been no demonstrations or microphone seizures. Even radical renewalist Stephen Rose looked subdued and chastened in a dark suit—a contrast to his volatile appearance at the Detroit assembly of the National Council of Churches last December. Ubiquitous Carl McIntire of fundamentalist fame was in town, as usual, to denounce COCU as “a miscarriage,” and, as usual, to broaden his attack: “We’re fighting Rome, Geneva, the NCC, and the new evangelicals.”

Speaking of anticipated COCU progress, Benfield said the next several years could be “the most effective and creative in the history of the American Protestant church.” A unique parish plan (see April 11, 1969, issue, page 47) and a strong stand against racism are considered to be outstanding features of the plan of union.

Some stumbling blocks showed up at St. Louis, however. Bishops and their place and power in the united church continued to perplex Episcopalians and United Methodists, and especially members of the three black Methodist churches. One Christian Methodist Episcopal pastor said that if the black churches don’t go into the union, it will be because they fear the weakening of their bishops’ powers in the new church.

Negro delegates also feared “black presence” may be swallowed up in the united church of some 20 million whites and only 4 million blacks. The Negro delegates pressed for assurance that racial balance would be achieved throughout. The consultation changed an earlier requirement that the first presiding bishop of the church be black, making that office alternate between bishops of different racial backgrounds. The consultation also voted that a constitutional provision “insure full participation of minority groups at every level of ministry, proportionate at the very least to the membership of such groups in the uniting church.”

Dr. Albert C. Outler, spritely professor of theology at southern Methodist University (a United Methodist delegate), found fault with the wording of the union draft. It shows “little understanding of the real meaning of radical theology and secularization,” he said. “It’s going to sound old hat unless it can be recast into theological language of the seventies.”

In group discussions, others agreed the plan was a cumbersome package badly in need of simplification. The plan fails to describe how the structures of uniting churches will be combined, a knotty problem.

United Methodist bishop Paul Washburn of Minnesota wanted the plan to emphasize more “personal religion”; a few words to “personalize” it were added. Several evangelicals remarked that the draft doesn’t call on man to love God for his own sake: love for God is chiefly expressed in terms of reconciliation ministry. The document makes little mention of sin (though it refers to the sin of disunity).

Church of South India bishop Lesslie Newbigin of Madras, who was the daily Bible lecturer, commented that COCU’s “present theological statements emphasize too much the activist, programmatic aspects of the life of the Church … and imbalance.” Earlier, he asserted: “We have protected our churches against the charge that we might be interested in evangelism.”

A United Presbyterian delegate expressed hope that COCU participants will take seriously the plan of union’s creedal affirmations and its relatively high Christology.

Each morning the Reverend George B. Thomas, a black professor of theology at Interdenominational Seminary in Atlanta, led the consultation in singing a hymn in Swahili. It was a nice touch. By the end of the week, most delegates were learning the words and their meaning. But it doubtless will be years before the impact of the voluminous plan of union will be fully understood by those in the pulpits and the pews of the proposed Church of Christ Uniting.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Ecumenical Journalism

The Christian Century, traditional voice of liberal theological thought in the United States, will absorb a five-year-old British paper with similar inclinations June 1.

The New Christian will cease separate publication thereafter and its name will appear on the cover and masthead of the 86-year-old Century. The editor of the British publication, Trevor Beeson, will become the Century’s full-time European editor.

A Century spokesman was quoted in the New York Times as saying that a major supporter of the New Christian had said he could no longer continue substantial financial backing.

The Century is said to have a current circulation of about 38,000, the New Christian about 9,500.

Pioneering In Portugal

Portuguese officials considered the event a “theatrical spectacle” and barred minors from attending. Evangelist John Haggai and his colleagues from Evangelism International in Atlanta called the effort a spiritual victory. The Americans had gone to Portugal in February for a three-part evangelistic crusade.

First came two weeks of preliminary services and prayer meetings led by a team of American ministers and laymen. Close behind came Haggai for a week-long crusade in Oporto, Portugal’s second city, home of port wine. A century earlier, missionary James Cassells, one of the “Cambridge Seven” converted under the ministry of D. L. Moody, was stoned in Oporto. On the site of his predecessor’s persecution, Haggai preached to overflow crowds.

The third stage took Haggai and his staff to Lisbon. There 3,000 people attended the first meeting at the capital’s largest indoor arena. Each night for two weeks attendance increased until the 5,000-seat Sports Pavilion was crammed with more than 7,000 people for the final meeting on March 8.

Good-By Gantry

Elmer Gantry almost came back to haunt clergymen. Sinclair Lewis’s portrayal of an incorrigible prophet for profit was a pamphleteering novel in the late twenties that became a popular movie in the late fifties. This month the cavalier evangelist swung onto the New York stage.

Gantry’s stage life was short. Poor casting (a classically trained Englishman played the earthy Midwesterner), among other problems, made a bad play that was killed by bad reviews after four performances.

Rainbow Over Abilene

There were as many variegated theological hues as ever at the Abilene Christian College Lectures this year (February 21–26), but a growing willingness to keep the colors in the same spectrum was also apparent.

While having no decision-making function, the lectures in Abilene, Texas, are annually the largest single gathering for the approximately 18,500 independent Churches of Christ, right-wing heirs of the nineteenth-century “Restoration” led by Thomas and Alexander Campbell. This year, an estimated 9,000 visitors attended. These Christians are distinguished from the Church of Christ and Christian Church members that attend the North American Christian Convention by their opposition to the use of musical instruments in worship. Both groups were once related to the congregations composing the ecumenically minded and centrally organized Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Conservative Reuel Lemmons of Austin, Texas, editor of the Firm Foundation, one of the most popular religious journals among the churches, said, “We’ve got great extremes of points of view that are poles apart. But the spirit of the crowd here as a whole is tolerant, informal, and fraternal.”

Much of this atmosphere is credited to Dr. John C. Stevens, 51, who was inaugurated February 21 as the eighth president of the liberal-arts college. Stevens, who moved up from assistant president, is himself a complex blend of conservative religious views and modern times. He is in wide demand as a civic and after-dinner speaker, and his down-homey talks never quite lose the flavor of the pulpit, which he has frequently filled. But they are laced with up-to-date applications of anecdotes from his academic field of history—and he flies himself to many of his engagements in his own single-engine plane.

ACC is technically not a “church school,” since it accepts no contributions from churches but depends on individual and governmental funds. Stevens and Dr. William J. Humble, new academic dean, were instrumental in adding the “committed college” category to the Danforth report on church-related colleges.

Conservative preachers in the churches are of course alarmed at such openness. Representatives of the “anticooperation” faction passed out literature at the lectures, reasserting their stand against churches’ contributing to central funds for mission and benevolent work. Another group circulated statements protesting the work of brethren who have rebuked a sister school, Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas, for its conservative political alignment.

At the other end of the spectrum, effervescent Carl W. Ketcherside of St. Louis attended to press for greater fellowship among all Churches of Christ and Christian Churches regardless of their views on musical instruments. And, while lecture space was allowed for hard-liners who left the impression that heaven is closed to those of differing views, the biggest crowds went to hear younger men score the churches themselves for that kind of thinking.

Two basic issues promise to keep such tensions alive—the churches’ refusal to subscribe to a written creed, and their understanding of baptism.

The lack of a creed has long attracted both (1) those who give equal weight to every verse of Scripture and hence divide from those who differ at any point, and (2) those who view the lack of a doctrinal statement to be a liberating influence calling for a greater tolerance of fellowship.

The insistence on the immersion of professing believers “for the remission of sins” and into the “church of Christ” (small c) continues to make the churches’ relationship with other believers problematic. A growing minority of leaders, both in and out of the churches’ pulpits, seem willing to admit that unsettled questions in their own ranks prevent a simple and exclusive identification of themselves with the New Testament church. They freely air such issues in a new journal, Mission, edited by Roy Bowen Ward, a Harvard Ph.D.

However, while protesting that they judge no one’s condition before God, those in the mainstream in the churches continue to respond to the more conservative leadership of men such as Lemmons, whose journal is enjoying its highest circulation in history.

Many believe that whether or not the churches hang together depends on the flexibility of men like Stevens at ACC, who said, “I figure if we [the college] can keep the conservatives and the liberals both just a little bit disappointed in us that we may be down the broad middle.”

RON DURHAM

Jews Legislate Their Identity

Israel’s Knesset (parliament) enacted a new law this month that defines a Jew as either one born of a Jewish mother, or a convert. The legislation in effect overturns a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court allowing registration of Jews in Israel by nationality without regard for religious affiliation.

A stormy debate preceded the vote, which was fifty-one to fourteen with nine abstentions. Even though the definition is similar to the interpretation of Jewish law by Orthodox rabbis, some of them complained that it recognized conversions by Reform rabbis.

One Orthodox rabbi whipped out a Reform prayer book, spat on it, and threw it on the floor. He later apologized. His ire had been aroused, he said, because the Reform prayer book had eliminated references to the return of Zion, the coming of the personal Messiah, the rebuilding of the Temple, as well as the resurrection of the dead.

The incident was doubly embarrassing for Israel because at the time the rabbis of the Reform movement in America were holding their convention in Jerusalem.

What man that sees the ever-whirling wheel

Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,

But that thereby doth find, and plainly feel,

How Mutability in them doth play

Her cruel sports, to many men’s decay?

—EDMUND SPENSER

The challenge of change knocks hard in our time. It seems to pound loudest on the door of the Church. Hearing its demands might be a rewarding way to observe the 1970 Easter season, and could help to clarify contemporary Christian responsibility—individual and collective.

But what is so peculiar about change today? Haven’t things always been in a state of flux?

The difference lies in volume and rate. Modern man is called upon not only to absorb changes but to accept more changes sooner. We face multiplied new hurdles before we have cleared the old ones. A backlog develops that is psychological, cultural, and moral. We lose touch without being aware of it.

The Church hasn’t quite caught up with a lot that has already happened. But the really big changes are yet to come. As the result of urbanization and automation, and of developments in transportation, communications, education, and medicine, we may soon have completely new life styles. It appears that we are on the threshold of what might be called The Great Transition.

In some respects we ought to welcome change, for it can make life better and more interesting. But when it comes too thick and fast, change creates grave problems. It seduces man to worship at the altar of newness. It spawns inadequacies, inconsistencies, and incongruities. It breeds maladjustment and prejudice as well as foot-dragging. It produces gaps between conviction and conduct, between potential and action. It separates young and old, the informed and the ignorant, the governors and the governed.

If these are the products of past changes, how are we going to cope with the greater flux yet to come?

The world today offers two main options. Communism seeks to shield the masses from abrupt change; it maintains order by offering “womb-to-tomb” security at the expense of individual freedom. The non-Communist world hopes to pacify people by holding out the hope of affluence for those who produce and behave.

There is a Christian alternative that still waits to be tried. The Greek philosopher Heracl*tus lived about the same time as the biblical prophet Malachi. When Heracl*tus was propounding his great theme that change is the only basic reality, Malachi was recording the words of the Lord, “I am the LORD, I change not.…” (Mal. 3:6). That is one reason why, for the Christian, despite all the changes in our time and the inevitability of many more in the days ahead, Easter is worth celebrating.

Christ’s resurrection represented the profoundest kind of change because it proclaimed the death of death. It is especially meaningful today, because if we appropriate its efficacy through faith, the Resurrection assures us of the impartation of a divine nature that will enable us to meet the challenge of change and to deal with our constantly altering environment. God himself does not change, and those who choose to cling to him find ultimate, unique stability. In a world of flux, he alone represents hope, and he alone can heal the psychological disorder brought on by sudden and dramatic changes.

With divine permanence as its foundation, the Christian community can face up to change collectively, too. It can bridge the moral and ethical gaps by appeal to the unchanging Word of the God who knows the end from the beginning and can thus see all that lies between in context. Biblical answers are not always apparent, but God never fails to fulfill his promises to honor those who search diligently. And it is a matter of historical record that men whose lives have been guided by Scripture have, in the long run, contributed most to cultural progress.

Christian answers, though often difficult to find, are inevitably easier to arrive at than to carry out. Man’s biggest problem has always been his reluctance to follow the divine precepts. But obedience to the will of God is essential if the Christian faith is going to bridge the gap from change to change. The Church has shown an amazing capacity to adapt itself to widely varying situations; indeed, it is one institution that not only has survived change but has been an agent of change, and has helped the world to accept and adjust to its social upheavals.

For many years our Puritan forebears were disparaged, and their weaknesses magnified. Increasingly, however, historians are acknowledging the great Puritan contributions of discipline, initiative, and sacrifice. The Puritans experienced a Great Transition of their own: they tamed a wilderness in the New World against almost insurmountable odds. A luxury-loving, permissive society would have perished under similar circ*mstances.

Today we face changes of another kind and of a different magnitude, but they are much more formidable. And to survive these, we need qualities much like those possessed by the Puritans.

Especially in the intellectual arena, evangelicals must exercise new initiative if flux is not to get the best of us. We have hardly begun to see and to show the implications of our faith in varied vocational dimensions. In every discipline, biblical alternatives must be advanced in depth and with scholarly vigor. In social service, deeds must accompany words. No longer will it do for the evangelical community to organize rallies and solicit signatures for causes that are in the long run peripheral.

One of the great myths of our day, and one of the hardest to dispel, is that evangelical Christianity is not a thinking man’s religion. Many persons uncritically assume that non-Christian thinkers have worked out all the problems of life in a neat little package. The truth is, of course, that twentieth-century thought-life, largely dominated as it is by non-Christian presuppositions, is in a state of profound confusion. There is no consensus worth talking about and nothing on the horizon to enable modern man to adjust to change more effectively.

Biblical principles are still foundational and are compelling and rationally satisfying, but their relevance to life today must be shown—by each believer in his own station of life as he contributes to the good of all by living his faith. That’s the genius of Christianity, and contemporary culture may one day soon discover it, if Christians fulfill their mandate.

School Disruptions

Sadly we have watched the disruptions that have overtaken public schools as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision requiring immediate integration in the middle of the present school year. The children have been the chief sufferers. Their education has been neglected, and in some places, such as Lamar, South Carolina, they themselves have been assaulted. What are we to think?

Several things are plain. First, there can be no second-rate citizens under our constitution, and equal rights and opportunities belong to all irrespective of race or color. Secondly, school integration both in the North and in the South has often moved with glacierlike slowness. This is no time to apply any law more stringently in one geographical area than in another. Thirdly, neighborhood housing patterns that cannot be easily changed lie at the heart of the school imbroglio. There is no immediate way, for example, to achieve thorough integration of schools in the District of Columbia, where more than 90 per cent of the students are black. Fourthly, the Supreme Court made no distinction between those regions that have honestly sought to solve the problem and those that have been sitting on their hands since the passage of federal and state civil rights legislation. Fifthly, indiscriminate busing is only a stop-gap measure that has not yet shown it will lead to what we all want: first-rate education for all of America’s children.

There are lessons we need to learn from the inequitable and thoroughly reprehensible situation that now confronts us. The first is that the passage of any law or series of laws is not in itself a final solution. We like to think it is, however. Once a law is passed we are inclined to shelve the problem; we lack the persistence to see the law through into practice.

A second lesson, simple yet significant, is that housing patterns will probably never reflect even approximately the black-white population percentages. Ideally, if the Negro population were evenly distributed among the total population, the school integration problem would be solved virtually overnight. But quite the opposite is taking place. More and more of the large cities are experiencing a greater influx of Negroes, and it is statistically plain that many if not all of them will shortly be predominantly Negro. Washington is now almost 70 per cent Negro; in 1950 the figure was 35 per cent; in 1960, 54 per cent; in 1965, 66 per cent. In Chicago the Negro population was 14 per cent in 1950, 23 per cent in 1960, and 28 per cent in 1965. In Philadelphia it was 18 per cent in 1950, 26 per cent in 1960, and 31 per cent in 1965. The census of 1970 will undoubtedly reveal higher percentages.

A third lesson comes from a perceptive Negro columnist, William Raspberry: “It may be that one reason why the schools, particularly in Washington, are doing such a poor job of educating black children is that we have spent too much effort on integrating the schools and too little on improving them.” The point is well taken. Integration is of little value if it leads to inferior education or does not lift substandard education to proper levels.

A fourth lesson we need to learn is that all of us must live together, and the sooner we learn to do it gracefully the better for us all. Clinging to obsolete notions that prevailed in a vastly different day must end. So must the intolerable delay in making adjustments that will themselves be far easier to bear than the current unrest and dissatisfaction of both Negroes and whites. We need to generate somehow a lot of love, something that has not so far been a dominant characteristic of our people. Legislation makes no provision for motivation. What we need is acceptance of the Gospel—real acceptance, in which we apply its principles to our lives. This will lead us out of racial disharmony into a peaceful living together in which racism becomes the exception rather than the rule.

COCU, Racism, and Biblical Truth

If the Church of Christ Uniting becomes a reality (see News, page 30), local congregations of the union partners will have a chance to withdraw from the projected super-church. A plan of union officially presented to the Consultation on Church Union in St. Louis this month permits any local congregation of a uniting denomination to withdraw from the united church within one year of the national service constituting it.

The “escape clause” apparently was a concession made by the drafters to sell the plan. Without that provision, some churches might not vote for union, the drafters reasoned. But the vice-chairman of the eighteen-member drafting commission made it clear at St. Louis that many of the commission members had opposed the escape clause.

Dr. John Satterwhite, a member of the A.M.E. Zion Church who is professor of ecumenics at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D. C., said such defection by local congregations would amount to “white racism.” “We know there are racists in the churches,” he said at a press conference. “Why should we make it easier for them to walk out?”

We wonder, though, why Dr. Satterwhite wants to keep racists in the new church. Those who oppose black bishops or integrated services are hardly likely to be assets.

But it is unfortunate that the racist tag already is being applied to all Christians who oppose the COCU plan. Dr. Satterwhite didn’t seem to recognize any other reason why congregations of the COCU partnership might decide, by a majority vote of their communicant members, to pull out of the giant merger.

We believe COCU’s fuzzy theology could well lead some congregations to prefer to stay out. Some evangelicals may balk at COCU’s lack of a firm statement on the authority of Scripture, or its low-key position on the creeds. Or its meager confession. And high-church Episcopalians may feel they cannot go along because the apostolic succession is not continued in the historic Anglican form.

Racism—in evangelical circles or anywhere else—is a contradiction of the Gospel. But let it be clear well ahead of voting on the plan of union that the blanket racist charge won’t stick. Let’s not allow such an insinuation to conceal conscientious motives for staying out—motives that have everything to do with biblical truth and nothing to do with skin color.

A Call From The Blue

A New York City police sergeant who is also a Ph.D. candidate has been recruiting Ivy Leaguers for his own and Washington’s police forces. “If you really care about cities, if you really care about individual people … become a policeman,” he says. He makes a good point. We suggest that Christians seriously consider the possibility that God might lead them into this vocation. To be a good policeman requires rare virtues, and Christians who represent the God of justice and mercy are (or should be) better equipped than most men to carry out the exacting duties of policemen amid the indifference or hostility they commonly face.

The ‘Watchman-Examiner’ Ceases Publication

After fifty-eight years of service to the cause of Christ, the Watchman-Examiner has died. A case could be made that this periodical was the single most important factor in creating and sustaining the fundamentalist movement within the Northern Baptist Convention.

Discerning the need for a weekly paper that would stand firmly for the historic faith, Curtis Lee Laws (1868–1946), after twenty-five years of pastoral ministry in Baltimore and Brooklyn, purchased the ailing eighty-nine-year-old, New York-based Examiner in 1911 and soon added to it the Boston-based Watchman, which had been founded in 1819. Under his editorship, which lasted until 1938, the Watchman-Examiner built up a nationwide readership. It was Curtis Lee Laws who, with other New York ministers, called upon J. C. Massee in 1920 to spark a protest on the national level against the modernism within the Northern Convention; and it was Laws who coined the term fundamentalist to designate this movement.

In 1928 Laws had the foresight to establish a trust fund, the income from which he hoped would insure the magazine’s continuance and its independence from denominational officialdom. This enabled it to survive the depression, when even the convention periodical folded. In 1911 there had been nine Baptist periodicals of fairly general circulation in the northern states; a couple of decades later, only the Watchman-Examiner was left, though in the forties the convention was able to revive an official periodical.

Throughout its life, the Watchman-Examiner sought to keep fundamentalist Baptists within the convention, hoping to accomplish desired reforms in time. During the early 1940s, under the editorship of John W. Bradbury, the magazine publicized and editorially supported the new Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, even as earlier it had supported the establishment of thoroughly conservative seminaries to supplement the older schools that were no longer teaching the same doctrines they had taught during the nineteenth century. When the convention’s leaders refused to allow the CBFMS the same kind of standing the conservative seminaries had enjoyed, the supporters of the new society were divided. The Watchman-Examiner (and all but one of the conservative seminaries) chose to remain with the convention, but much of its readership formed the Conservative Baptist Association in 1948.

By 1950, when the Northern Convention changed its name to the American Baptist Convention, the Watchman-Examiner had lost much of its former influence. It was blamed by convention loyalists for fomenting schism and by those in the CBA for betrayal of the cause of a consistently conservative association of churches. Thus it was only a matter of time before the periodical’s expenses would overtake its endowment and other sources of income. By 1969 it had 3,300 subscribers, only one-eighth as many as it had had in the twenties. During its lifetime it contributed mightily to the maintenance of the historic Baptist faith in the northern and western states, but, to its regret, much of this faith is now in congregations which are outside the American Baptist Convention.

Evaluating Christian Colleges

A few weeks ago our news section published a list of twelve Christian liberal-arts colleges that eighteen deans had designated outstanding when questioned by Biola College’s dean (see January 30 issue, page 36). Predictably, letters arrived from omitted colleges with some valid protests (see March 13 issue, page 21).

Well, which are the “best” Christian colleges? How can we evaluate them? One way, of course, is to use only the criteria by which one ranks the “best” colleges regardless of ideology. The New York Times Almanac for 1970 goes out on a limb to divide institutions into five groups, A through E, according to the demonstrated academic potential of the student body. The Ivy League schools, Stanford, Chicago, and a few others are in group A. Wheaton manages to make group C (where it keeps company with such schools as Berkeley and Michigan). Baylor, Calvin, Gordon, Houghton, Taylor, Westmont, and Whitworth are among the colleges in group E.

Certainly any Christian college would want to be within the minimum standards for all colleges. However, it is also necessary to evaluate Christian colleges by additional criteria that will have relevance at the judgment seat of Christ. There individual Christians will be examined to separate the “wood, hay, and stubble” from the “gold, silver, and precious stones” of their lives. Commendation will be determined, not by comparing one person with another, but by comparing a person’s achievement with his potential. Christian institutions such as colleges will not be judged directly, but individuals connected with them will be. We suggest that a necessary basis for evaluating a college that is trying to be Christian is the extent to which its students appear to have been helped to increase the “gold, silver, and precious stones” that God desires to produce through them. Equally relevant is the degree to which the college academically and vocationally helps to equip Christians to use their own particular and varying talents in their lives and careers to the greater glory of our Creator and Redeemer.

A college should do its best to develop the academic potential of its student body (and some colleges with bright students might do worse at developing their potential than colleges with less promising student bodies). But to be rightly considered Christian, a college must also be concerned about helping to develop the fruit of the Spirit. No accrediting agency inquires about that save the one at which our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ will preside.

Making The Census Scene

On April Fool’s Day, the United States will sit for a national portrait. The photographer will be census-bureau counters and computers—a composite of personal and impersonal fact-finders. The sitting itself will not take long; most Americans will merely fill in twenty-two circles. Developing the picture, however, may take a while. And, despite precautions to focus carefully and to get everyone in, the finished picture will surely be imperfect. It may not capture us at our best; perhaps it will show us as we are. Then, in the tradition of unretouched “before” pictures, we can begin to firm up the flabby parts of our national figure.

It would also be wise on April 1 to count—and begin to eliminate—personal failures that help make the national scene. We may be able to fool the other fellow some of the time, and we may be able to fool ourselves most of the time, into thinking all the fault for national problems lies elsewhere. But there is one observer whom we can’t fool any of the time—an omniscient God.

The Christian As A Visitor

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (Jas. 1:27).

James assumes with good warrant that one cannot really understand and sympathize with those bereft of the family breadwinner unless one is in contact with them, visiting them and seeing for oneself their distress. If journalists and social workers seem to be more sympathetic toward the poor, doubtless it is because their professional responsibilities call for them to see the situation themselves. Christians who make pronouncements about those on relief (almost none of whom are able-bodied adult males) without having gotten to know some of them by visitation would do well to review the inspired writer’s test for pure religion.

James takes second place to no one in his valuation of the Word of God. But he also tells those who likewise profess to value it to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (1:22). When is the last time you did something about the call to visit, and hence learn the needs of and minister to, those who are without husbands or fathers? It need hardly be added that death is not the only thing that can leave a household without a fully functioning husband and father, permanently or temporarily. Perhaps there are more “widows” and “orphans” in our communities and in our congregations than there might at first appear to be. We may not feel we can do much to improve the world, but we certainly can do a lot to help a family.

A student of statistical probabilities would undoubtedly have predicted that the combination was bound to turn up one of these days. Plastic dashboard madonnas and rear-window stickers displaying the Playboy rabbit are both plentiful enough that it was perhaps only a matter of time until some car would carry one of each. But when I finally saw the combination on a Chicago expressway I was unprepared for it, and was immediately thrown into a frenzied attempt to absorb it into my theology. Only the kind of dullard who is totally insensitive to eschatological tensions, or who thinks of the old Brooklyn Dodgers’ infield when he hears the name “Cox,” would take refuge in the too-easy hypothesis that one was merely witnessing the resultant compromise of some intra-family generation gap. No, this had to be one of those “revelatory events” that contemporary theologians are always talking about, one of those symbols, or combinations of symbols, through which one can grasp the Spirit of the Age—or, more literally, the pregnant meaning-centers of our history.

But what message was this Oldsmobile mediating? My first thought was, of course, that the coexistence of the Blessed Virgin and the Playboy Bunny calls for a new chapter in the analysis of possible Christ-culture relationships. What we have here is the Mother of Christ and the Pet of Hefner standing in a relatively stable confrontation within a single organism (sort of), with neither one being quite dominated, or transformed by, or exalted at the expense of, the other. But the more I think about it, the more it looks like the old Lutheran business; and one would hardly expect that a contemporary kairos would be a mere replay of the fifth chapter of H. R. Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture.

Perhaps, instead, the message was a sort of kerygmatic revision of The Feminine Mystique, a picture of the transforming image of the Twentieth-Century Woman: the Madonna symbolizing Woman as asserting the Courage-to-be-as-a-part (heteronomy) and the Bunny as the expression of the autonomous Courage-to-be-as-oneself, with both of these, in tension, pointing to some middle, even transcendent, way that at once embraces and rises above the conflict.

Or we might have here a graphic portrayal of the prophetic-priestly clash: the Mother standing as the transmitter and protector of the traditional values, yet engaging in creative encounter—dare one say “dialogue”?—with the advocator of the New Morality, by whose prophetic, catalytic agency the old structures will be transformed and recreated in order that there might be a dynamic movement through history—a movement emboldened by Freedom but disciplined by a maternal affection for Law.

Nor should we ignore the possible contribution from this to the Church’s ongoing task of translating the myths of the three-story universe into meaningful and manageable symbols for our day. Imagine, for example, a new “Cotton Patch Version of the Apocalypse” that replaces the Lamb, the Woman, and the Dragon with … well, keeping to car decorations, why not the Bunny, the Virgin, and the Flag?

But in the final analysis perhaps this is a case where the medium is the message. It might be that the apparent opposition between the forms of these two symbols is rendered irrelevant by the fact that they are made of the same substance, that they are fashioned by, and from, the same plastic-and-cellophane culture, a culture whose very plasticity allows for the real possibility that Madonnas and Bunnies are mass-produced in the same factory. Perhaps such a culture robs both sacred and profane of the power to judge the other. If so, then the message is that images made of such stuff may peacefully coexist with nothing to fear from each other. But, of course, they would together stand defenseless before “an fervent heat.”—RICHARD J. MOUW, instructor in philosophy, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The devil’s look pierced thin smoke-ribbons and fell on his underling, Fireball. “How are things shaping up this Easter?” he asked.

Fireball shrugged. “Normal. Lots of nice outfits being assembled. Florists doing a big business. Choirs tuning up on the old hymns about victory over the grave.”

“Anything serious to our cause?”

“No more than usual. Some of them are always a problem. They mean that creed they repeat. But millions of them probably never dig this Easter thing.”

Satan winced. “I suppose it would avail me nothing to protest your use of this earth-patois.”

“Your pardon, Majesty. But everybody seems to be doing it, especially in America, where I am assigned. Not that I’m ungrateful for the assignment. It’s a great place for doing your thing. Particularly around Christmas or Easter. They really lay it on you then!”

The devil glowered. “In ‘doing your thing,’ as you insist on putting it, you made out a report?”

“Affirmative, Majesty. For one thing, the Greeks seem to be ahead.”

“The Greeks?”

“The Greeks, sir. They had this thing about immortality, remember? Lots of Christians appear to like their ideas better than those in the New Testament. Many of them seem to be taking less and less to the Resurrection.”

“Hmmm. Very interesting. Immortality is fine. Let them talk about it. But muddy the theme as much as possible.”

Fireball nodded. “I know. Play down the centrality of the Resurrection. Shoo them from the fact of how that event motivated the evangelism of the first Christians.”

“That, and much more. Try to keep the word justification out of their minds. They are not to realize why He arose from the dead. And keep them from studying Paul too much, especially where he insists that if Christ did not rise from the dead, then mankind cannot be saved.”

“Noted, Majesty.”

“They must be kept from grasping what the Resurrection has to do with the believer’s personal spiritual power; they must be refrained from associating their religious lives too closely with that open grave!”

“Check, sir.”

“Deflect them from connecting the Resurrection with stewardship also.”

Fireball beamed. “You mean like when Paul comes up with that poetry about the Resurrection, then winds up referring to the passing of the collection plate for the needy?”

“Put it your way. Also, as much as possible keep the Resurrection dissociated from man’s grief over the loss of loved ones. Steer them away from Paul when he tells believers not to mourn over the dead hopelessly—because Someone has ‘defeated’ death.”

“Will do,” said Fireball.

“What really matters, little brother, is that we make immortality becloud the issue. Hide from them that awesome blow to our cause when He quit that grave. The Church today must not feel the force of this thing! Never forget how the young Church felt it—they overrode all our philosophical arguments with their very glow! Easter shone out of them. You can’t stop people who actually believe that death has been done in. Remember how those early Christians kept shouting about the grave being conquered? They could scarcely open their mouths without singing about it. And we didn’t stop them, either.”

“People like that can be dangerous,” agreed Fireball.

“Easter, you understand, isn’t only something that happened in history, but because it did happen in history it causes things to happen yet. Easter is something Christians carry about in the world with them. We have to keep the Resurrection out of history so we can keep it out of human personalities. Ethics is involved, spirituality, stewardship, evangelism—everything!”

“Unquestionably.”

“Think of all the people in the world. Think of all their death-fears, their agonies over loved ones that die. What if they ever really got gripped by this thing—this living faith that death has been done in by Him? How could you hold back that rising tide of joy? How would you kill all that hope?”

“The very thought shakes me,” Fireball said with a shudder.

“Attend me, little brother. Easter is a big date on our calendar. Attack Christianity at its very heart—the Resurrection! Bring that bastion down! Let them sing about immortality, let them preach about it—but let them forget how it is barely a Christian word. It is the Resurrection that must be blotted from their thinking. Keep a blanket over that open grave! Never let them peek in and see that it’s empty. Let the clergymen copy one of their famous and fluent preachers who said that His body lies in a nameless Syrian tomb but His deathless spirit goes marching on. That sort of thing! Only outside that tomb does He have the keys of death and hell! Understand?”

“Understand, Majesty. My assignment is quite clear. I have to steal Easter.”

“Go steal it, then. Swallow up the Resurrection in undefined immortality! Keep Him locked in that tomb and you can keep Christianity locked up there with Him!” Smoke floated about Satan’s grimace. “If the theologians ever really let Him out of that tomb—hell help us! All heaven might break loose!”—LON WOODRUM, evangelist, Hastings, Michigan.