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The Legitimacy Of Biblical Criticism

The New Testament and Criticism, by George Eldon Ladd (Eerdmans, 1967, 222 pp. $3.95), is reviewed by David H. Wallace, professor of biblical theology, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.

For more than a century the battle over the legitimacy and necessity of biblical criticism raged. Now it is all over, except among a rear-guard sector of Protestantism that is either openly hostile or else uneasily querulous about the whole venture. Dr. Ladd, professor of New Testament exegesis and theology at Fuller Seminary, attempts in this volume to redefine the word “evangelical” so as to secure for biblical criticism a rightful place within the spirit of this adjective.

The eight chapters endeavor to confirm the central thesis that “the Bible is the Word of God given in the words of men in history.” The introduction views the rationalistic criticism of the radical school as motivated by metaphysical, not scientific or historical, considerations. Therefore criticism itself is neutral; its acceptability is determined by the presuppositions that animate it.

The first chapter asserts that the Bible is properly called the “Word of God” in that it faithfully discloses God’s saving acts in history plus their authoritative interpretation. That is, divine event plus interpretation yields revelation. Chapter 2 is a statement of the nature of historical criticism: it involves evaluation, sifting, analysis, and scrutiny, not negative judgments against the Bible. Ladd swiftly reviews the history of criticism as stemming from the Enlightenment, and discusses its rationalistic origins. Last, he shows the positive results of the historical-theological method, which is not merely tolerable but mandatory for all competent study of sacred Scripture.

Textual criticism is the subject of the third chapter, in which the general problem of text transmission and accuracy is spelled out, especially in relation to the King James Version. The author states that “the careful reader will doubtless discover a few undetected errors in the present work” (p. 56), and the prophecy is fulfilled two pages later, where Pope “Damascus” instead of Pope Damasus is cited. Another error, in Greek, appears on page 65. Linguistic criticism shows that the Word of God is couched in human speech, which is itself the legitimate object of scientific inquiry. Language, which is a human phenomenon, is not static but dynamic, and so words change their meaning; thus scholarly criticism is necessary for ascertaining the meaning of a text. The fifth chapter deals with literary criticism, especially in connection with the Gospels. The doctrine of inspiration does not demand as a precondition any independence of one Evangelist from another; on the contrary, Luke states that he made use of other sources.

Form criticism, that bête noire of con-temporary biblical criticism, is the subject of the next chapter. Naturally the Bultmann school comes under close review. Ladd handles it deftly pointing out its weaknesses of presupposition and method and yet casting light upon its value and contribution. I wish he had said “some form critics” instead of “form critics” (p. 163), for not all form critics are driven by the foundational ideas to which Bultmann and his school subscribe, especially in respect to historical skepticism and the gospel tradition.

Reading For Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

• Christy, by Catherine Marshall (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). Readers of A Man Called Peter will heartily welcome Mrs. Marshall’s first novel, a warm and moving story set in the Appalachian hill country, scene of her own upbringing.

• Who Speaks for the Church?, by Paul Ramsey (Abingdon, $2.45). A brilliant critique of the procedures in political policy-making exhibited by the World Council of Churches at its Geneva Conference on Church and Society.

• The Davidson Affair, by Stuart Jackman (Eerdmans, $3.50). In the vivid immediacy of a news documentary, novelist Jackman grippingly re-creates the events surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus “Davidson.”

The seventh chapter is given over to a discussion of historical criticism. Ladd shows that the mighty acts of God took place within history and are therefore historically contingent. However, this contingency does not compromise the finality of the divine act itself but affects only its human circ*mstance and expression. This chapter is a sound defense of the historical method. Ladd assesses its necessity and utility but also delineates its limitations for determining final revelational truth. That is, historical criticism by reason of its nature and method can neither confirm nor disestablish the fact that God was in Christ.

The final chapter, entitled “Comparative Religions Criticism,” is an analysis of the so-called religionsgeschichtliche Schule of Bousset, Wrade, and Reitzenstein. This hypothesis, which has been brought over en bloc into the Bultmann school, is highly vulnerable because of the cluster of uncriticized assumptions lying at its heart. This school may itself be brought under criticism by use of the very tools that many reject as destructive of the validity of the Gospel.

My greatest reserve about this timely and scholarly volume concerns not the subject nor the author’s skill but rather his persistent use of the word “evangelical.” Apart from a few comments on pages 32 and 171, Ladd gives no exact definition of the word. Wasn’t it Augustine who once commented that he knew what time was until he was asked to define it? Many positions Ladd claims as “evangelical” could be affirmed also by many modern Roman Catholic biblical scholars, or by the “chastened liberal,” or even in some cases by members of sects or heretical groups that also claim a “high” view of Scripture. Is “evangelical” used in contrast to sacerdotal (Roman Catholic) or to liberal (Harnack or Bultmann)? It seems to me that the word points to a mood generally gathered around a loyalty to the Bible but is incapable of much precision of thought beyond this. The larger and prior question of Christology is undiscussed. Can one be “evangelical” and subscribe to a failing or indifferent view of Christ? Or can one have an orthodox Christology and yet fail to meet the standards of the “evangelical”?

This book was written for those who consciously identify themselves as evangelicals in the hope of stimulating them to gain a larger and more coherent understanding of the science and art of biblical criticism. It therefore deserves a wide reading within this element of Protestantism.

Double-Barreled Attack

Enemy in the Pew?, by Daniel D. Walker (Harper & Row, 1967, 240 pp., $1.95, paper), is reviewed by William E. Boslough, chairman, division of biblical studies, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

Enemy in the Pew? was written “to help the layman know his job and feel its challenge.” Its author, an experienced pastor, has read much of the decade’s negative literature on the meaning and mission of the Church but still looks optimistically to the future. His preface sets the tone of the contents:

There are problems but they can be faced and handled. God is not dead. The church is not a pawn in The Secular City. Thousands of churchmen do not find the pew very “comfortable.” Many laymen have already thawed out if indeed they ever were God’s Frozen People. And the ranks of Christian churchmen have been full of people who were Honest to God long before Bishop Robinson ever thought of writing a book by that title.

There is a revolution in the Church so critical that the sincere layman must assay its demands. It calls for a shift from activity to depth, from membership to discipleship, from amorality to morality in matters of human decency. One of the problems is that the Christian layman has forgotten who he is. He has lost his self-confidence and forgotten “the dignity of being a layman.” He must become aware of his worth (Christ died for him) and his royal blood (he is a child of God). With this knowledge a churchman stands tall.

We continually tend to become entangled in the superficial:

It doesn’t seem to get through to us that it is possible for a man to receive a friendly greeting at the door, worship in a strikingly beautiful sanctuary, attend Sunday School in a pleasingly decorated and air-conditioned room, receive a friendly letter from the pastor, and a well-meaning visit from laymen without ever getting the faintest hint of what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.

And so there is need for a theological orientation. Our “major problems are theological. They stem from bad religion.” The Sunday service is essential. Here “encounter with God” must take place. Laymen must become literate:

Real churchmanship involves knowledge of the Bible, familiarity with the workings of one’s denomination, awareness of the emerging world church, and an understanding of the meaning of the Christian faith for our highly technical and complex culture.

What the Church needs is men and women who think clearly and act lovingly.

This is a double-barreled book. One barrel is directed regularly at the clergyman who doesn’t know where he is headed, and the other barrel at the layman who follows blindly and unconcernedly. Walker does not write theology or methodology. The enemy in the pew is the satchel of negative ideas that govern the actions of irresponsible churchmen. Neither layman nor clergyman can read this little volume without being challenged by its clear thinking, its honest analysis of a tragic situation, and its positive approach to down-to-earth Christian responsibilities.

Can ‘God-Talk’ Be Studied?

God-Talk: An Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology, by John Macquarrie (Harper & Row, 1967, 255 pp., $6), is reviewed by William J. Samarin, associate professor of linguistics, The Hartford Seminary Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut.

What bothers me about many proponents of “modern theology” is their ambivalent attitude toward modernity. On the one hand, they declare the need to face up to a secularized world that believes in a “self-regulating cosmos” in which events are described by other events equally immanent in the world. It is for this reason that mythological thinking is obsolete and the word “God” taken from its lexicon is dead. The other side of this ambivalence is a reluctance to adopt the methodology that led to secularism: namely, empiricism—the investigation of the stuff out of which the universe is made.

This book illustrates this inconsistency in modern theology. It is a book about religious and theological language. Its author, professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary (New York), advocates a hermeneutic that is almost as modern as New York’s Museum of Modern Art. All talk of God as another being, for example, a being different in kind from ourselves, must be relegated to an anti-quarium.

But his arguments for the renovation of theology, which are linguistic arguments, are not based on the findings of scientific linguistics. The book contains no reference to any recent study in linguistics proper or in the related disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. According to Macquarrie, “those who have made language the specific theme of their researches” are philosophers! So his single chapter on “some general reflections on language” is not fact-oriented but conjectural and reflective.

To say that God-Talk is like a chair with a shortened leg is not to say it can’t be sat on. The problem it considers is crucial to theology, and the treatment of the problem is impeccable. The book reads easily in spite of the difficult nature of the subject. Macquarrie reveals himself as an astute logician who can make an excellent case for yet another application of existentialism.

The ostensible purpose of God-Talk is to deal with theological language. And this Macquarrie conceives of as a problem: “how in a human language one can talk intelligibly about a divine subject-matter,” or how one can understand what a theologian means when he talks about God, angels, immortality, sin, grace, and so on. He takes up the problem by first examining how Bultmann, Barth, and Tillich solved it. Their weaknesses demand a better understanding of the nature of language, and particularly of theological vocabulary. For him this means appreciating the context of a discourse—that it involves something said by someone, to someone, about something. The seed of existentialism is planted here, and it bears full fruit in a stimulating discussion of the implications of “linguistic philosophy” (which is philosophy and not linguistics!).

This treatment of religious language is not all in abstract language. One chapter deals with its varieties as exemplified in a specific writing of St. Athanasius: De Incarnatione. And three chapters deal with three modes of expression found in religious language: mythology, symbolism, and analogy. Each of these contributes, the author says, to our understanding of the ultimate nature of things, but analogy is crucial.

If this book were truly about “how” people talk about the divine and what they “mean” when they use words like sin, it would be read by those linguists and anthropologists, even “secular” ones, who are interested in the way humans use language. But God-Talk cannot be recommended to them, because it is, fundamentally, an argument for the validity of religious faith. It is a book in the field of apologetics. These are the author’s own words: In “faith” there can be no certitude, but “the more we can show that God-talk has a coherent logic, the more it is shown that in God is a reasonable faith.”

However, Macquarrie would not like it said that he was advancing another argument for the existence of God, for he rejects the possibility of establishing the “truth” of faith on the basis of empirical arguments. Yet this is precisely what he seems to be doing. His thesis is that human language reveals a cognitive function: it shows that man perceives something about the universe (about being) that is otherwise unknown and unknowable. He would reject the reductionism of secular science, asserting that “man is the ontological entity, because he not only has being, like any other entity, but has his being disclosed to him, so that he has the potentiality to become the being to which Being as such manifests itself, gives itself and entrusts itself. ‘God’ is the religious name for Being as experienced in a faith-awakening revelation.”

But Macquarrie cannot escape the dilemma he so much wants to avoid. If there is anything at all true about language, it is that it is empirical: we hear and use it. In the final analysis, a linguistic-existential understanding of religious beliefs must be empirical. And although we learn much from philosophical exercises like the one demonstrated by this book, we would be a lot better off if we started with a franker appraisal of the empirical foundations of religious phenomena.

From The Unconscious Depths

The Face of the Deep: The Religious Ideas of C. G. Jung, by Charles Bartruff Hanna (Westminster, 1967, 203 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Alvin Quall, professor of education and philosophy and director of graduate studies, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.

Dr. Charles B. Hanna, a practicing psychiatrist, has taken key concepts from six of C. G. Jung’s writings and has analyzed them in terms of theological considerations. The theme of The Face of the Deep is that man has failed to use the resources available through his unconscious. To be fulfilled, man must draw from the depths of his being, which consists not only of that which presently impinges upon him but also of a collective unconscious (racially inherited psychic material that is present in the individual unconscious) that profoundly affects what he is and what he may become.

Jung used the term “the powers” in his conception of God; these “powers” go beyond the consciousness of man and show themselves in the events of a person’s life. In dealing with God and the God-image, Jung expresses a faith that God is not only far away but also omnipresent.

To describe “God and the Dawn of Consciousness,” Jung uses much symbolism. Here his approach will be rather unacceptable to those who hold a conservative view of the Scriptures, for he refers to records prior to the creation account in Genesis and frequently speaks of “myth” in describing monotheism.

The Face of the Deep criticizes man’s attempt to gain a rational understanding of salvation. Jung believed that man is too scientific in his approach to the understanding of sin and of the means by which one may be redeemed from guilt.

The book emphasizes that man should give attention to the mysteries that undergird his being, for only in this way can he truly know God and become a completely “whole” person.

Taking The Race Question To Heart

The Segregated Covenant, by William A. Osborne (Herder and Herder, 1967, 252 pp., $5.95), and Black Power—White Resistance, by Fred Powledge (World. 1967, 282 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Richard L. Troutman, professor of history, Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, many Americans heaved a sigh of relief. The ten years since the Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public schools had been filled with boycotts, marches, demonstrations, and not a little violence. Now the Negro had his rights, and America could return to business as usual.

But the race issue would not down, and the Negro revolution that began in 1955 when Mrs. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her seat on a bus to a white man has now grown to the point where it is undoubtedly America’s most painful problem.

In The Segregated Covenant William Osborne describes the role played by the Roman Catholic Church in breaking down segregation in areas where it exercises a dominating influence—churches, schools, and hospitals. Osborne, a professional sociologist, is especially concerned with the efforts of the church ince the announcement by the American bishops at their historic 1958 meeting that “the heart of the race question is moral and religious” and that “segregation cannot be reconciled with the Christian view of our fellow men.” This is a more forthright position, by the way, than many Protestants have taken.

As Osborne points out, however, it is one thing for the hierarchy to state the official position of the church and quite another for the membership, north and south, urban and rural, to respond in practice. Officially, all Catholic institutions everywhere in America are open to Negroes, but population trends have resulted in “more de facto segregation in Catholic parishes than ever before.” And the Catholic response to discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing, even on the part of bishops and clergy, has been halting.

One leaves this book with the impression that whatever progress the Catholic Church has made on the race issue is the result of factors external to the church. Osborne emphasizes that the church moved only after the federal government and the civil-rights movement had created a climate favorable to action.

One would think that in a book on race relations the opinions of Negroes themselves would be important; but virtually none are presented in this book.

It is the wide gulf between words and action that troubles Fred Powledge in Black Power—White Resistance. Whites will not enjoy this book. The author, a native Southerner and a free-lance writer, lays bare the paternalism and hypocrisy that have characterized white response to this “new civil war.”

Powledge is an angry young man. He is angry because the North has adopted the South’s favorite trick, tokenism, as “an excellent device for keeping the neck of the Negro firmly under foot of the white man while allowing the white man to proclaim his belief in tolerance.” He is angry about the way the war on poverty (“the war on poor people”) has been handled, and judges it a “widespread failure” unless the maximum feasible participation of the poor becomes a reality. And he is angry with those liberals who think that “sweet reason” is sufficient to disarm those who frustrate the Negro’s struggle for equality.

Powledge is also a pessimistic young man. He fears that if social change is to come to America, “it is to be ushered in not by sweet reason … but quite possibly by more violence and hatred.” In a moving passage, Powledge writes that “too many years have passed, too many hurts have settled into open wounds, too much blood has flowed, too many people are convinced now … that nothing will change.” And in view of the riots that many Northern cities have recently experienced, one may ponder his observation that America “may well already have become a nation of hate and fear … where riots will be commonplace and where parks will be empty … and where tolerance is ridiculed.”

Black Power—White Resistance is a spirited, moving book with valuable insights into the attitude of the new left. Every concerned American ought to read it.

How Many Parts To Man?

The Biblical Meaning of Man, by Dom Wulstan Mork (Bruce, 1967, 168 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by H. Leo Eddleman, president, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Is man a trichotomous, dichotomous, or unitary being? The author approaches this old question with a freshness of style and a convincing measure of logic. In chapters 1–8 he deals with his subject comprehensively. In chapter 9, however, he is less than convincing in discussing “living wholly.” This may be the result of his monastic background.

At no point does he resolve the problem of biblical terminology in First Thessalonians 5:23. Does the absolutistic nature of man’s unity still hold? Are the terms “spirit, soul, and body” used for descriptive, analytical, and possibly eschatological purposes only? Is there a chronological or temporary disruption of the unified nature of personality from the time of death till resurrection?

On the whole, however, Dom Mork gives evidence of wide reading and deep comprehension of his subject.

Paperbacks

The Dialogue of Christians and Jews, by Peter Schneider (Seabury, 1967, 196 pp., $1.95). A sensitive discussion of the relations between Jews and Christians down the centuries that faces the tragedies of the past with candor but concludes optimistically that mutual understanding will draw the two groups closer together.

God and Evil, by William Fitch (Eerdmans, 1967, 183 pp., $2.65). This study, subtitled “Studies in the Mystery of Suffering and Pain,” throws welcome light on a vexed question: Why does a God of love permit human affliction?—or, at a deeper level, Why is there irrational evil in a God-designed universe?

The Miracle of Mark, by Roy A. Harrisville (Augsburg, 1967, 128 pp., $1.50). An original treatment, written with verve and insight, of Mark’s Gospel, seen as a sermon on the mission, death, and exaltation of Christ that follows the pattern of Philippians 2:6–11; but the author runs into difficulties over Christ’s enthronement, which is absent from Mark’s ending.

The History and Character of Calvinism, by John T. McNeill (Oxford, 1967, 470 pp., $2.75). A paperback edition of a standard work on Calvin and his influence in the old and new worlds. A postscript of four pages, written for this edition, updates the bibliography and annotates source material.

Exegetical Method: A Student’s Handbook, by Otto Kaiser and W. G. Kummel (Seabury, 1967, 95 pp., $2.95). Two notable European biblical scholars aim to introduce the first-year B.D. student to the scientific methods of biblical criticism, and offer much useful information. The approach is moderately conservative—by German standards—but the twenty pages of notes are absurdly technical and off-putting.

The Hermeneutic of Erasmus, by John W. Aldridge (John Knox, 1966, 134 pp., $2.75). A joint Zürich-Richmond, Virginia publication in the series, “Basel Studies in Theology.” Hermeneutics is an O.K. term today, and this historical study may have light to shed on the current debate with the observation that “the basic criterian of any hermeneutic must be the content of the revelation itself”; but we face a different set of problems from those of the sixteenth century.

Ideas

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In another generation it may be too late for salvage and perhaps even for salvation

Throughout the twentieth century the United States has faced the world with unabashed confidence in its own destiny, certain that American perspective and ingenuity could easily solve problems that trouble the planet. Suddenly, however, we have been plummeted into a decade of distressing doubts. Has the United States, perchance, passed its peak?

Trusted leaders in our generation have tampered with American ideals, and many of these ideals now are crumbling. What’s more, the liberal prophets have provided no real solutions to basic problems; rather, they have widened the conditions that make tyranny possible.

Many of today’s young Americans find the thought of Washington praying at Valley Forge a monstrous incongruity. Surmising that God has deserted the armed forces and the aging cause of the free world, they presume to escort him instead into psychedelic hangouts and into youthful pursuits of license.

As respect for law and order wanes, violence and crime rise to new heights even in cities that are “model” in rate of employment and civil rights. The Viet Nam “go slow” strategy looks more and more like a stalemate to be dumped into the scrawny lap of the United Nations. At the same time adolescent democracy struggles for survival in the grim shadows of Hanoi.

The political realm, unfortunately, has not been the only one to barter respected traditions in the mart of modern revisonism. Spokesmen for institutional Christianity have trusted political dynamisms for social betterment more than the Gospel of Christ; some even esteem revolutionary goals above the rule of law. Even divinity-school dropouts have ranged themselves alongside leaders of the new left in heralding a new materialistic utopia devoid of any spiritual redemption.

Today paganism is baring its vicious spirit as part of the contemporary American soul. Civil society seems to be falling apart. Mob violence and murder in Detroit in July, 1967, stunned Americans almost as deeply as had President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas a few years ago. Andrew Glass and Jesse Lewis said of those four terrible days and nights of rioting and killing, burning and looting in America’s fifth-largest city: “It was a convulsion of the sort that Americans are accustomed to reading about in faraway places, such as Saigon, Santo Domingo, Nigeria, or Hong Kong” (The Washington Post, July 30, 1967). But now it had happened here, and before most Americans had taken the warnings seriously that indeed it might.

All the glib chatter about one world and a new global order born of secular idealism has clearly run its course; the illusion of world progress is kept alive now mainly by empty symbols like the United Nations, dollar grants of near-bankrupt governments, and breath-taking scientific discoveries that lend themselves as readily to evil as to good.

In the last third of the twentieth century we seem headed for more desperate changes than any generation has experienced since New Testament times. For all its highly touted ecumenical developments and means of mass communication, our generation may actually be the one that fails to communicate biblical Christianity effectively to its successors. Fortunately, its novel theologies (like those of Altizer and Hamilton) fade away after brief popularity. It is tragic, however, that one or another denominational publishing house will advance tens of thousands of dollars to attract such assaults on the historic faith. Desperately needed is not some new cultic aberration but a great spiritual awakening. It is essential and urgent that evangelicals speak with apostolic candor to the fast-disintegrating social scene.

“History has caught up with America,” writes Paul Gia Russo of Milwaukee, director of the Religion and Law Research Project. “Winds are wild! The odds for recovery seem already against us. But we need not, even now, descend into a sleepless night ruled by authorities and powers. The tide can be turned by men and women ready to go to their graves honorably before the eyes of God, courageous souls seeking fullness of faith, dedicated to good works, proving their lives. Stay with the ‘evangel’ that leaps over self-made deceptions back upon the greens of God-given realities where the winds blow free and eyes can still see the beauties of a wondrous world.”

The time has come to give new visibility to twice-born men and women who espouse New Testament perspectives. Their bold and fresh witness can shatter the modern misconception of the Church of Jesus Christ as a comfortable country club in suburbia, or a metropolitan building to which people commute once a week simply to hear a zealous orator, or a Geneva-based center of political cunning dominated by jet-set professionals.

Ours could be the generation in which evangelical Christians find one another across multitudinous fences and together gain fresh power and bold voice to confront the world in depth with the Gospel of the Risen One. Cannot evangelical believers, by acting together locally where the people are, find vital new ways of telling what Christ is doing among those who know and trust him—new ways of proclaiming the good news of salvation and of sharing the joy of personal obedience to the will of God? Cannot our ecumenical divisions and subdivisions, our denominational idolatries and diatribes, be forgotten long enough to allow the New Testament claim and the dynamic of God’s Spirit to occupy the forefront of such a witness?

Bad as the dark side of American life in the 1960s may be, it should not be thought to discount the reservoir of good that remains as a Christian inheritance, nor to minimize the power of biblical faith to renew a wayward generation.

Past decades have seen violence, too—the Homestead strike, forced occupation of industrial plants in depression days, operations of various crime syndicates, mass murders by Capone gangsters, repeated Ku Klux Klan lynchings, not to mention the murders of Lincoln and Garfield. Nor is paganism something recent in America. Already in the eighteenth century, the American university mind was captivated by the French Revolution and atheism was rampant.

What under these circ*mstances could have spared America from certain doom, could have shaped new opportunities of national usefulness, but the surprising grace of God? As a godly minority sank to its knees in spiritual intercession, God raised up Spirit-filled leaders to confront the citizenry with a call to repentance; the revival quickening that consequently swept over America then and in nineteenth century brought vast changes. Similar quickening today, if a spiritual vanguard is burdened for it, and if God be pleased, can shape a new and better America in this fast-waning twentieth century. Our churches must have an overwhelming rediscovery of Christ’s Gospel and its power; even evangelical congregations stand in need of a new Reformation. If the twentieth century is not simply to fade away, our generation must come to its spiritual rescue; in another generation it may be too late for salvage and perhaps even for salvation.

Without it, there is no life fit for eternity

For a number of generations now, the reality of a personal conversion to Jesus Christ, and the necessity of it, has been slipping from the consciousness of a large segment of the Christian churches. Universalism denies the need for conversion, while secular theology dilutes its meaning by broadening it to include the redemption of the secular social structures. Some ecumenical leaders speak of “education” or “social action” as an alternative to conversion and seek to muffle the particularism of the Christian faith in the multi-colored ecumenical blanket. Many church members are acutely embarrassed by conversion. Others are hostile to the concept.

At the Miami Assembly of the National Council of Churches, delegates and accredited visitors responded to an official questionnaire by placing three other goals before “conversion” in a listing of missionary priorities—“meeting acute human need,” “working under indigenous churches,” and “leadership training.” In a separate question they listed “conversion” together with “community and national problems” as next to the least important items. Only “preaching” was lower. The same survey also indicated that at least half of the 521 church leaders believed that a Hindu, a religious Jew, and a person ignorant of Jesus can achieve salvation.

Unfortunately, these views are not confined to the ecumenical leaders. A contextual evangelism that subordinates the proclamation of the Gospel to social action now claims advocates in most of the leading denominations, often within the department of evangelism itself. And on a broad base the idea of conversion is increasingly shunted aside by the more nebulous concept of mission, to the detriment of many pastors and their congregations.

In the early days of the Christian Church this was not so. Christianity burst upon the ancient world with a stirring demand for instant and total renunciation of sin and the worship of pagan gods and a permanent turning to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. Conversion placed a man upon “the way.” It was a turning from the former life, marked by repentance, and a turning toward God, marked by faith. The process was essential. Jesus said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3), and Peter declared, “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19). The early Church strove to turn men from their sins in the light of the impending final judgment and the end of the present world order and to turn them to Jesus Christ as Saviour.

Moreover, this appeal was not only a characteristic of the Church; with the partial exception of Judaism, it was also a unique characteristic of the Church. In our century, ever since the publication of William James’s monumental Varieties of Religious Experience, which analyzed the phenomenon of conversion from the standpoint of the new discipline of psychology, many religious thinkers and psychologists have tended to view conversion as an element in the religious experience of all men. But this is inaccurate, and the early history of the Church refutes it. With very few exceptions, the popular religions of the ancient world were tolerant of all religious feeling. A Greek might worship Athena in Athens, Apollo at Delphi, Poseidon at Sunion, and Diana at Ephesus, or even all in the same city at the same time, and neither Athena, Apollo, Poseidon, nor Diana would be offended. A man’s pantheon could be as large as his piety. The nature of his religious feeling or a sense of gratitude for some particular favor might dispose him to give one deity a special prominence, as was often true in the worship of Mithras, Isis, Dionysus, Cybele, or the other beneficent deities of the mystery cults. But there was nothing exclusive in these religious systems. The genius of ancient religion lay in syncretism rather than in particularization. Consequently, there was no such thing as conversion in the normal Christian sense.

Socrates can be said to have favored some kind of conversion on the part of those who listened to him. But in Plato’s Apology he speaks of the afterlife either as dreamless sleep or as conversation with the wise men who have gone on before, never even hinting at the thought of rewards or punishment. And in its positive aspects, the life he advocates is little more than the pursuit of truth or virtue. There was also a case of a senator who converted from Christianity to paganism, saying: “O goddess, I have sinned: forgive me. I have returned.” But this happened after Christianity had made its impact, probably in the fourth century, and in obvious imitation of Christian terminology.

In Christianity, as in Judaism, conversion played an important and initiatory role. In one of the best studies of conversion in this early period, former Harvard professor A. D. Nock calls attention to this contrast between the pagan and biblical religions and writes of Judaism and Christianity:

Judaism said in effect to a man who was thinking of becoming a proselyte: “You are in your sins. Make a new start, put aside idolatry and the immoral practices which go with it, become a naturalized member of the Chosen People by a threefold rite of baptism, circumcision, and offering, live as God’s law commands, and you will have every hope of a share in the life of the world to come.” Christianity said: “You are in your sins, a state inevitable for you as a human being and aggravated by your willfulness. No action of yours will enable you to make a new start.… Stake everything on Jesus the Christ being your savior, and God will give to you the privilege of making a new start as a new being” [Conversion, Oxford, 1961, p. 13].

Nothing in the dogmas of the ancient rivals to Judaism and Christianity can even begin to be called conversion in this sense.

This early awareness of the urgent need for conversion needs to be recaptured in the contemporary Church. This is so, not only because conversion has been an important aspect of the Christian proclamation historically, but also because the reality of conversion is closely tied to vital elements of Christian theology.

All non-Christian religions stand for the deliverance of man by man’s own efforts, whether by sacrament, esoteric knowledge, or moral attainments. In proclaiming the biblical revelation, Christianity stands for the unconditional renunciation of all human efforts at salvation and for absolute allegiance to Christ, who has opened the way to God by means of his death and resurrection. Christianity proclaims original sin, the total inability of man to please God apart from Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit in turning man to God, and unmerited salvation. Thus it also proclaims the need for conversion as the move by which one passes from all human attempts to achieve salvation to a resting in the efficacious and gracious acts of God. The doctrine of grace goes hand in hand with a firm understanding of conversion.

Moreover, Christianity teaches on the authority of Scripture that without conversion there is no new life. There is no knowledge of the Holy Spirit. And without a participation in the life of the Holy Spirit there can be no awareness of spiritual things. There can be no knowledge of one’s own nature in the sight of God, and no intimations of his purposes in the flow of human history. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

This is not to say that conversion must follow a predetermined pattern. Personal conversions may be abrupt or gradual, quiet or emotional. The Apostle Paul and the Philippian jailer seem to have been converted instantly and with great emotion. Timothy, on the other hand, seems to have come to the fullness of belief quietly over a longer period (2 Tim. 1:5), and so have many leading figures of the Christian Church. The essential element is conversion itself. And conversion is determined, not by the mere act of turning, still less by fervor or by the speed at which the turn is made. It is determined by the uniqueness of what one turns from and of the Person, Jesus Christ, to whom one turns.

The problem with conversion today is not really an unusual problem. It is merely an acute one, and it is acute simply because it is found so extensively within the churches. Man is a religious being. He wants salvation. But man wants salvation without conversion. He wants to obtain the ultimate reward without relinquishing his past or present sin or forfeiting the sense of satisfaction that comes from believing he deserves God’s favor. None of the non-Christian religions confronts man at this point. Here Christianity does confront him. The demand is high. But for those who turn to Jesus, God promises the presence and help of the Holy Spirit in this life together with the life of the world to come.

DEATH TAKES A LEADER

The death of Dr. V. Raymond Edman, chancellor of Wheaton College, marks the close of a distinguished missionary career. His life spanned almost seven decades and left a sense of evangelistic urgency upon thousands who now bear their evangelical witness from Chicago to Calcutta. His missionary career in tropical Ecuador almost ended in 1928 when his physical condition sank so low that associates dyed Mrs. Edman’s wedding dress black for an inevitable funeral. But hundreds of special prayer meetings were held, and Edman recovered to serve later for more than two decades as president of America’s most prestigious evangelical college.

His emphasis in education was somewhat less academic than pietistic; some observers wished that Christ’s lordship as King of Truth might have gained as much visibility as his saviourhood as Mediator of Grace. But Edman served in an era in American life when neither emphasis found any haven in public education, and when even many church-related campuses sacrificed both. One thing those who knew Dr. Edman were never allowed to forget: The goal of Christian education is an evangelical mission in the world, and that mission must fail unless Christ’s saving grace is fervently proferred to men.

TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS

Jesus’ observation that God “sendeth rain on the just and unjust” alike took on somber significance last month as hurricane Beulah’s cloudbursts sent record floods coursing through the Rio Grande area of Texas and Mexico. The destructive hurricane left nearly fifty persons dead and thousands homeless and destitute.

For those who have suffered greatly through the ravages of wind and water there can be little easy comfort. Widespread destruction is a fearful thing, and such times strongly test the character of men. In Salfurrias, Texas, some responded to the disruption of normal life by looting flooded stores. But much more frequent were the acts of heroism and the deep stirrings of compassion that sent disaster supplies pouring into the area and opened American facilities to thousands of hard-hit Mexican families. For those untouched by the tragedy, hurricane Beulah voiced the need to cultivate such strength of character as will stand firm in times that try men’s souls.

MISSIONS AND MISSILES

President Johnson’s decision to build an anti-ballistic-missile system represents a staggering commitment. Those who feel the government should move decisively where freedom is imperiled will applaud the decision. Yet it also gives some pause. The economic effect will be felt for years to come. The announced price of $5 billion—surely a minimal figure—means another substantial increase in the national debt if the long-range Spartan and shorter-range Sprint missiles are to be poised in time to meet a Chinese nuclear threat.

It is too simplistic to suggest that this defensive step would have been unnecessary had the American Christian community not been so stingy in its missionary giving. Not all the world’s problems are the fault of the Church; the corruption of human nature lies at the heart of our global predicament. But there is a lesson for Christians nonetheless. American Protestants now spend annually in foreign missions about $200,000,000—less than is spent in the United States for chewing gum. A greater investment of our material resources in the spiritual plight of pagan lands may save our grandchildren from having to waste billions on the implements of war.

BISHOP PIKE SCORES A VICTORY

The Episcopal House of Bishops has erected new procedural roadblocks that make it next to impossible to try a man for heresy in the Episcopal Church. No longer are charges by three bishops sufficient to initiate heresy procedings. Changes in canonical law enacted by the Bishops and the House of Deputies last month at Seattle now require ten bishops to institute such action, after which their request must be approved by two-thirds of the House of Bishops before a heresy trial may be held. Passage of the new rules represented a victory for proponents of greater theological laxity over advocates of fidelity to the church’s creedal stance.

Bishop James Pike emerged the winner in his well publicized controversy with his colleagues. Not only was he satisfied by enactment of the stringent new heresy procedures, but he also succeeded in getting the Bishops to consent to the necessity of “due process of law” in censure cases. Censured by the House of Bishops last year for “irresponsible” flippancy, Pike complained that he was prevented at the time from presenting testimony in his defense. The amended censure procedure voted last month cast doubt on the validity of Pike’s censure and, in effect, enabled Pike to censure the Bishops for their improper procedure against him.

The ecclesiastical gamesmanship practiced by church leaders throughout the Pike affair has clearly been a strategy to prevent a heresy trial that could have resulted in condemnation of unorthodox views held by Pike and other top-echelon prelates. The wrist-slapping censure of Pike in 1966 was an attempt to placate theological conservatives whose financial contributions lagged in proportion to their discontentment with his doctrinal aberrations. The liberal leanings of the hierarchy were obvious in their affirmation of the 1967 report referring to heresy as “anachronistic,” and in their enactment of new procedures. Their actions obliquely suggest that church leaders inclined to follow Bishop Pike’s example of promoting views contrary to the creed of the church may now do so with virtually no threat of a heresy trial.

Perhaps a decisive confrontation between conservatives and liberals yet looms on the Episcopal horizon.

L. Nelson Bell

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I was sitting beside the pilot of a small plane as we flew over terrain unfamiliar to both of us. Spread out on my knee was a map of the section we were crossing, and we had other maps to use as we passed from one area to another. In our ears there was the incessant beep-beep of the “omni” signal, the dots and dashes of the radio navigational station that told us we were on course. In addition, the pilot was maintaining voice contact with the towers of airports in the vicinity. All was well.

For efficient and safe flying, numerous means are available to enable a pilot to know his position. Instruments show altitude, air speed, position of the plane in relation to the horizon, fuel supply, direction, and the like. More sophisticated planes have radar to warn of storms ahead or of the presence of other planes as well as the ever-present voice to give information and advice—the voice of one trained for this task and ever ready to help. All these modern aviation helps are available to the pilot of a small single-engine plane as well as to the crews of the largest jets aloft.

Herrick’S English Garden

With beauty

Folded in each phrase

God’s vicar poet

Sang His praise:

We see Him come

And know Him ours

Who with His sunshine

And His showers

Turns all the patient ground

To flowers.

The threshold

Of his open door

Was worn by footsteps

Of the poor.…

Still in these leaves

Of fantasy

And flowers sits

An eternal May;

And on the green

Immortal trees

Stand fruits

Of the “Hesperides”

Where God’s hungering

Till time is done

Come for gold apples

Of the sun.

M. WHITCOMB HESS

Moreover, even the Christian dramatist may elect to explore only a limited area of the Christian life and omit large areas of Christian experience. Eliot, in his decision to work a limited vein, could write Christian drama without writing all-inclusive Christian drama. And the Christian reader and viewer may easily derive real values from such drama as that we have just explored. Laughter at man’s irrationalism can point to the absurdity of man’s pride; horror at man’s depravity can serve as evidence of sin and the need for salvation; pity for man’s pain and confusion can show the need for God’s controlling hand.

But there is much more to the Christian faith than this. The Christian artist can use such materials to point to man’s agonizing need for the controlling hand of God. But he could also explore a Christian life that is not a series of sterile and confusing symbols but a pattern of grand emotions and real dignity. He could present (as Graham Greene has consistently striven to do) the reality of God’s presence in life. He could end his plays, not in futility and despair, but with a recognition that there is a power that can save and heal man and guide him so that he need not live in chaos. He could show men of God as something more than nervous Nellies, organization men, seducers, perverts, egoists, and weak-minded exponents of a worn-out system. He could explore the possibility that sins against our fellow humans are not the only sins, that we may also sin against ourselves and against our God. He could delve into moral problems with an awareness of their complexity but with a belief in good and evil as well—not simply with pat sociological and psychologically deterministic explanations concluding in a meaningless self-pity.

The Christian artist could emphasize salvation as well as sin, peace as well as turmoil, certainty as well as doubt. No one desires to dictate to the Christian artist what he must write to be considered orthodox, but it would be a relief to see some powerful, intellectually and artistically satisfying Christian drama.

In the meantime, Christians should become more sensitive to attacks on their liturgy, sacred symbols, and faith. They need not believe that Osborne’s hero is honestly representative of modern man, or that Eliot has presented an exhaustive vision of available choices for our way of life. They should reject the concept of voluptuous crucifixions or of the pervert-as-Christ. There is no need to embrace each new idea as novel, fascinating, or assuredly worthy of serious consideration.

Shock has served too long in the theater as substitute for thought, and the result has been as harmful to the theater as to the Church. It has divorced the theater from a vital source of inspiration and has made a glittering toy out of material that could be majestic and profound.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

- More fromNancy M. Tischler

Johannes Schneider

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Second of Two Parts

That existential theology uses the biblical concepts but beclouds them or even robs them of their actual content is most clearly seen in statements about the Resurrection. The seriousness of the present situation is shown by a comment made by Rudolf Augstein, publisher of Der Spiegel. It is difficult to say to what extent Augstein feels any personal responsibility toward the Christian faith; but he is firmly convinced that Christianity stands or falls on the resurrection of Jesus. Therefore he earnestly confronts Christendom with this question: “Do you believe that the crucified Christ was raised from the dead? Is your faith one that without the Resurrection, without belief in the Resurrection, would be an empty faith?”

“Modern” theology has refused to answer this question, or at best has given an evasive reply.

4. The Resurrection of Jesus.

Bultmann has said quite openly: “A corpse cannot come to life again and climb out of the grave.” It is quite possible to speak of a “resurrection” he says, but Jesus was not raised to a new life; rather, he rose into the kerygma. That is, there is no living Christ who is a divine Person; he is present only where the Word that testifies of him is proclaimed.

In an interview with an editor of Der Spiegel, Bultmann again stated clearly and unmistakably what he believes: The presence of (the non-resurrected) Jesus is not found, as Goethe would say, in his operation throughout the history of thought; “it occurs” only now and again in Christian proclamation and in faith. Belief in the Resurrection means only the belief “that death is not a sinking away into nothingness, but rather that God, who continually meets us from beyond, also meets us in our death.”

W. Marxsen makes a similar statement:

The talk about Jesus’ resurrection simply confirms that he lives on in the kerygma of the Church. According to the New Testament accounts, there were witnesses who insisted that they saw Jesus after his death. On the basis of this visual experience they came, after reflective interpretation, to the declaration that Jesus was raised by God. We today, however, are no longer in a position to speak so forthrightly of Jesus’ resurrection as one specific event.

This, says Marxsen, was possible only in an age influenced by the apocalyptic writings of later Judaism, “whose fantastic or even mythological ideas no longer have meaning for us.” The disciples, we are told, with their declaration of the Resurrection wanted to indicate only “that the cause of Jesus continues to expand after his death.” Since Jesus is present only in the kerygma of the Church, “the Christ event occurs in it, by always introducing the subject of Jesus anew.” According to this view, the Sprachereignis (speech-event) becomes the Heilsereignis (salvation-event). This means that the task of preaching is not to make the God-appointed fact of salvation the object of Christian proclamation; preaching cannot do this, since the resurrection of Christ was never a historical or even a redemptive event!

It is interesting, incidentally, to see how a number of existential theologians are trying to develop a new terminology. Expressions like Wortgeschehen (word-event), Sprachereignis (speech-event), zur Sprache bringen (to bring to expression) are formulations whose purpose is a Sprachtheologie (linguistic theology). This is supposed to show that theology can postulate no historical facts and need not presuppose them, since revelation occurs today in the proclaimed Word. And this means, as far as Jesus’ resurrection is concerned, that it is not a historical event, inasmuch as its factuality cannot be determined, and that therefore it cannot be made an object of faith. It is possible to believe only in the living, present Christ who comes in the proclaimed Word.

The tragedy is, however, that this Christ does not exist for the existential theologian who is schooled in higher criticism, since with Christ’s death everything has come to an end. The Sprachereignis (speech-event), therefore, has no redemptio-historical foundation. Consequently, this theology together with the proclamation that rests upon it is wholly untenable. It destroys the ground of salvation. Faith in the Risen One is possible only because God has raised Jesus from the dead and because I accept the message that is thus proclaimed to me.

According to “modern” theology, one can have no full assurance of Jesus’ resurrection, moreover, because the resurrection accounts transmitted to us and the stories of the appearances are not one and the same. In the informative interview reported in Der Spiegel, Bultmann reiterated his view that reports of a bodily resurrection of Jesus are but legends: they are “the legendary concretizing of the faith of the early Church in the Risen One, namely, that God exalted the Crucified One as Lord.” Notice that he says: This is what the Church believes; there is no actual act of God that is the foundation for this belief.

Marburg theologian Hans Grasz in the 1964 (second) edition of his book Ostergeschehen und Osterberichte (“Easter Events and Easter Reports”) has examined the texts given us in the New Testament and come to the following conclusion: “Even if one could peal off the legendary formulations and layers of growth one still could not produce a ‘kernel,’ of which it could be said that it portrays the occurrence and circ*mstances of the original events with any degree of uniformity and clarity.” A similar, if not as far-reaching, comment comes from Wolfhart Pannenberg, who has nothing to do with existentialism but who, in contrast, emphasizes the basic significance of the salvation verities. Pannenberg says: The resurrection appearances recorded in the Gospels that Paul does not mention (1 Cor. 15) are so legendary in character that one can scarcely find in them even one grain of historicity.

But surely the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection must have had some kind of meaning! Bultmann considers it to be the fact that through the certainty given them that “Jesus lives!” there was unlocked to the disciples the significance of the Cross. The disciples recognized that Jesus’ death on the Cross was no human death; it was, rather, God’s judgment upon the world, which as such deprives death of its power.

But how did they gain this awareness, if there was no redeeming event for them? One is supposed to be able, it seems, to speak of Jesus’ resurrection even if it never occurred! This is especially apparent in the case of Grasz. He begins a statement with these words: “Jesus arose and appeared to the disciples,” but then continues, “but of this neither the camera nor the sound recorder noted anything.” We refer again to W. Marxsen, who says: “If I wanted to express this [that is, that the non-resurrected Jesus is present in the proclamation of the Church] in the older kind of terminology and if I knew the limits of this way of expressing it, then I could say today: ‘He lives, he did not remain dead. He is risen.’”

In this statement by Marxsen one can see how ministers are enjoined to use the New Testament concepts but to associate them with entirely different ideas. This becomes then, however, a deliberate misleading of the Church; in other words, it is “another gospel.” A man who is greatly concerned about the Church’s proclamation has said, quite rightly: “When I sit in the pew I must hear not only what the preacher says but also what he does not say.” This comment pinpoints the situation we encounter today.

Clearly the denial of Jesus’ resurrection has very far-reaching consequences. Having made this denial, one can no longer talk about the return of Christ. Teaching about the last things falls away. Hope for the fulfillment of redemption becomes meaningless. If Christ was not raised, then neither shall we be raised. This is already evident by the fact that in “modern” theology the concept of “eschatology” has largely lost its original meaning and has been given new meaning.

What we have discussed in this section can be summarized in Künneth’s affirmation at the great Dortmund assembly: As to what happened Easter morning, there can be only one answer according to existential theology—absolutely nothing. But if nothing happened, then the “subjective experiences” of the disciples, which they said were appearances of the resurrected Lord, have no importance either. Yet the resurrection of Jesus, as Künneth stated, is the fundumentum Christianum, the centrum Christianum. The Church of Christ must say with the Apostle Paul: “But now is Christ raised from the dead by the glorious power of God.”

5. Faith.

It is very important to examine “modern” theology’s concept of faith and to inquire how far it agrees with that of the New Testament.

One does not do justice to Christian faith if, like E. Fuchs and others, he understands it to be Glauben wie Jesus (faith like that of Jesus). Then Jesus becomes merely a model, but not the object, of faith, for faith in this view deals only with God. Apostolic teaching requires faith in the one God and in Jesus Christ, through whom God brought salvation to the world. No one can be saved who does not have this faith.

“Modern” theology repudiates an intellectual concept of faith that is satisfied with accepting certain statements of faith as true and that makes acknowledgment of salvation facts an absolute prerequisite for the full realization of faith. No doubt its polemic has a grain of truth in it, insofar as it is directed against a false understanding of faith. But it also offers an incorrect account of faith and the facts of salvation.

The New Testament proceeds on the principle that faith comes through preaching (Rom. 10:17). That is, faith can come about only where the message of salvation, the content of which centers about the great acts of God, has previously been proclaimed. Certainly the kerygma comes to man first of all as a gift of divine grace. But this always occurs in such a way that there is an underlying presentation of the facts of salvation. “Be ye reconciled to God” follows affirmation of the fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor. 5:17–19), a fact that is declared through preaching. The message of the Cross reveals itself as the beneficient saving power of God (1 Cor. 1:18); it is accepted by faith and experienced as a living reality of salvation. By the Holy Spirit’s working, it becomes assurance of salvation. But if preaching precedes faith, then the believer also knows what he believes. This is no mere intellectual assent but rather an inner surrender to the divine truth revealed in Jesus Christ. The idea of assuming it to be true is foreign to the New Testament.

The messages of the Resurrection and the Cross are very closely related, for without the witness of the risen Christ the preaching of the Cross is empty; it completely loses its meaning (1 Cor. 15:14).

This all means that the salvation message can be properly given only if one begins with the facts of redemption and proclaims the crucified and risen Christ, the exalted One living at God’s right hand. In other words, the salvation message is essentially more than simply a call for decision or for proper understanding of the self. The apostolic kerygma is filled with redemption history; it has a specific content that cannot be suppressed. If this concept is suppressed, then the Word easily becomes a mysterious mystical or even “mythological” mass of something or other. It becomes emptied of meaning; for the kerygma cannot itself be the salvation-event. Actually, we have news of the salvation wrought by God in Christ; and this, if accepted in obedient faith, gives the believer access to the fullness of divine redemptive reality and grants him an awareness of salvation that is deepened through constant instruction in the Word of truth and is brought to ever-richer unfolding.

Therefore, it cannot be said that faith is a matter only of accepting certain dogmatic statements any more than it can be said that faith is independent of them. Concerning the inner relation between proclamation and faith Paul said clearly in First Corinthians 15:1–5:

I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures; and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve.

In verse 11 the Apostle closes the section with the words: “So we preach and so ye believed.”

Karl Barth is completely right when he says that faith is bound to its “object” (God, Christ, salvation in Christ). It is a process wrought by the Holy Ghost. One believes with the heart what is proclaimed in the salvation message, and testifies with the mouth the great truths of salvation (Rom. 10:9). Bultmann is abbreviating the New Testament teaching of faith, therefore, when he states that faith is “acknowledgment of God’s judgment upon man” and “subjection to God’s judgment.” Faith, much rather, gives us access to salvation and a knowledge of the Son of God.

One more brief observation. “Modern” theology often speaks about the decision to which the proclaimed Word brings us. By this is not always—in fact, is not usually—meant decision for Christ and full surrender of life to him. Frey is right when he states in his Die Frage nach Jesus Christ heute (The Question Concerning Jesus Today) that one stands at the place of summons and appeal by Christ, “at the place, one might say, of awakening just outside the doors of conversion and rebirth.” Preaching must not only present a call to decision, important as this is; it must also declare all the fullness of redemption found in Christ.

6. Holy Scripture.

We have tried to show that “modern” theology does indeed use several basic New Testament concepts but that it empties them and then fills them with a content that misses their original meaning. Thus the basic principles of faith are shaken or totally shattered. A thought structure remains that hangs in mid-air and has no saving power whatever. The ultimate result is finally a godless and Christless “Christianity” that barely exists on just a few words of Christ that have survived the fire of historical criticism and have been found “genuine.”

In his newest publication, Das Neue Testament als Buch der Kirche (“The New Testament as the Book of the Church”), W. Marxsen states that we are to consider the New Testament as the oldest Predigtband des Christentums (collected sermons of Christendom) preserved to us. The statement put forward by representatives of kerygma-theology, therefore, that in the Gospels we are dealing not with absolutely reliable historical reports but with witnesses of the faith of the post-Easter church, is made to encompass the entire New Testament.

Behind it all, in the final analysis, is the question about Sitz im Leben (the situation in the Church out of which the New Testament writings arose) that is of determinative significance for the Formgeschichte method founded by Bultmann and Dibelius. These scholars are concerned with acknowledging the forces that shaped the tradition concerning Jesus. Dibelius has tried to show that the preachers, teachers, and narrators of early Christianity put together the material as it now appears in the Gospels. Marxsen considers the preaching of the apostles to be the Sitz im Leben. The New Testament, therefore, is not a record of revelation but rather a collection of kerygmatic testimonies, quite diverse, of the first proclaimers of the redemption message. Marxsen has expressed what he means by this more specifically in his treatise Der Streit um die Bibel (“The Battle Over the Bible”). Here we read: What is written in the New Testament is “not God’s Word in and of itself.” “It is always God’s Word only for specific persons. For this reason we can say only that the New Testament writers wrote with the claim of speaking God’s Word for their readers but not for us.” This means that the New Testament has no absolute, once-for-all, valid revelational character.

The question of how the New Testament can become God’s Word for us Marxsen answers as follows: We must “put an ear to” the manifold and changeable aspects of the history of the Word of God in New Testament times and “must express the old Sache [matter] in words that we say and understand today, so that the Word reaches us and in our time and surroundings.” The use of the word Sache is just another example of the typically neutral manner of speaking in “modern” theology! By it is meant—and one dare not be deceived by this—not the entire fullness of the Gospel, but rather the demythologized, existentially interpreted kerygma, in which only what is relevant to the present world and existence can come to expression. Marxsen himself cites as example the Virgin Birth, which he says is a Hellenistic concept incorporated later into the New Testament, a concept that was never intended to describe a real even if mystical occurrence but in fact only showed “that in Jesus there was a meeting with God.”

Marxsen is certainly one of the most radical representatives of “modern” theology, but he can formulate his views so cleverly and impressively that they penetrate the thinking of many people. Let us state his basic thesis once more: The New Testament is not plainly God’s Word; rather, it first becomes God’s Word for us when—stripped of all the ballast of contemporaneous history—it is presented to us anew. In Marxsen, then, we have not only a recasting but also a corruption of a biblical concept.

The result of this view of the New Testament can be shown by a concrete example. Manfred Mezger, Professor of practical theology at Mainz, rejects the return of Christ and the following end-time events, and reduces the Christian hope for the future to the one statement: “Jesus lives—and I with him” (Radius 1966, 2). The deadly thing about all this is that this comment topples every foundation of the faith, for according to Mezger, there is neither any resurrected, living Christ, nor any expectation of a resurrection for us. Here a man latches onto biblical terminology to make a statement that proves absolutely nothing because it dangles in mid-air. To what extent Mezger depreciates the matter of last things is seen by the following: “It wouldn’t hurt if the church had less wild and exaggerated chatter about last things (Rev. 16–20) for it proves nothing, absolutely nothing.” “Rhetoric concerning some prescribed future that can be easily mouthed with unsupportable declarations suggests a solid body of content by its thunder of judgment and whisper of blessedness, but is actually as insubstantial as water. One is supposed to rejoice in something like this? No thanks!” That is sheer cynicism!

Mezger shows his monstrous presumption when he says that it was the radical turnabout in theology and faith (that is, the shift to a “modern” theology that looks away from the “security of mythological ideas”) that led to “pure faith”; this is faith, says Mezger, that has freed itself from “miracles” and “ancient concepts held to be true” that we can no longer realize today. It is this “pure” faith, and nothing else, that we are asked to proclaim. This, in other words, is the practical significance of the new interpretation of the Bible!

Summary

We can compress all we have said into just one sentence, a sentence found in Carlo Büchner’s excellent recently published work concerning the “No Other Gospel” movement. Büchner says of “modern” theology: “It does not use other words to say the same thing but uses the same words to say something different.” His incisive analysis continues:

What is involved is really “another Gospel” in the sense of Galatians 1:6, 7 even if the motives of the former situation differ from those of today.

The present theological tendencies which undermine the fundamentals of the faith use a biblical vocabulary that makes the cause and content of teaching almost impenetrable to the theologically untrained person, so that not until quite some time has elapsed, and when it is too late, is it recognized what spirit has been at work in a church. The greatest danger of all is that the central salvation affirmations, the basis of Christian faith and spiritual life, are attacked.

Künneth views the same problems as Büchner but evaluates things even more sharply:

What is fatal and disturbing about the theological situation is that the same words and ideas are used on every hand, but with completely different meaning. One would think that intellectual honesty—so often espoused today—must surely admit that a theology which has elevated the call for a “new self-awareness” to a general theme and through the absolutized method of its “existential interpretation” tries to impose an existentialist theological meaning upon all Scripture has forsaken the very foundation of apostolic witness. The traditional Christian terminology remains untouched but the “Sache” has become something quite different [Sonntagsblatt, 1966, 52]

In an exemplary concise and precise manner, Büchner has brought together the affirmations of the various strains of existential theology, insofar as they are detrimental, by saying:

The virgin birth falls away, the Christmas story becomes but a legend, Jesus had no messianic consciousness, he knew nothing of his resurrection and coming again, his death he did not understand as a death of reconciliation, his atoning work through his suffering is primitive mythology, his death on the cross has no redemptive meaning for us, Jesus never performed miracles, he was only truly man but not truly God, the Last Supper was not instituted by him, he did not rise bodily. Concerning the living God it is said: He is not the Father of Jesus Christ, he does not exist beyond our world in a metaphysical realm, there is no personal God and there is no God in personal relationship. Of the Holy Ghost it is said that he is but a construct, of Luke, for example; in other words, there is no Holy Ghost.

This delineation could be continued and amplified. The result of these views is a colossal loss of substance, a depreciation of salvation principles. From what remains and is existentially interpreted issues an adulteration of the Gospel, for existential interpretation, in its demythologized form, does not express what the “mythological” texts really mean. There can no longer be any talk of a “scientific” exegesis.

We can only pray God to preserve his Church from false teaching and maintain it in the truth, so that his Word will be proclaimed in the full authority of the Holy Ghost.

- More fromJohannes Schneider

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

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First in a Series

The image of the Roman Catholic Church as obstinately insensitive to the great movements of history has been dramatically shattered in our day. However much this image may have been justifiable in the past, it is a mistake to imagine that an institution as large and far-flung as Roman Catholicism could remain unaffected by the spirit of the times. Thus, for example, the papal church could not ignore that dynamic movement of the sixteenth century known historically as the Reformation. Its answer was both irrational, in the form of persecution, and rational, in the form of the Council of Trent, which sought to present the teachings of Rome in a manner that would be acceptable to the world of that day but which also pronounced anathemas against the distinctive doctrines of the Reformed faith.

So too in our day, Roman Catholicism, unable to insulate itself (assuming that it wished to do so) against the growing heat of the ecumenical spirit, has had to adjust and re-examine itself in confrontation with this movement of contemporary history. Its answer, happily unmarred by the irrationality of a past age, has received focus at the official level in the summoning of the Second Vatican Council and the definitive statements that issued from that council. Although no new designation, the term “ecumenical” used in connection with this council (according to the papal reckoning, the twenty-first ecumenical council in the history of the Church) has taken on added significance because of the temper of the times. The introduction to the Decree on Ecumenism declares plainly that “promoting the restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the chief concerns of the Second Sacred Ecumenical Synod of the Vatican,” pointing out that in recent times God “has begun to bestow more generously upon divided Christians remorse over their divisions and a longing for unity.” (An English translation of this and the other statements officially issued by the council has been published under the title The Documents of Vatican II [New York, 1966]. Our references to this volume will use the abbreviation DV II followed by the page number.) The introduction continues:

Everywhere large numbers have felt the impulse of this grace, and among our separated brethren also there increases from day to day a movement, fostered by the grace of the Holy Spirit, for the restoration of unity among all Christians. Taking part in this movement, which is called ecumenical, are those who invoke the Triune God and confess Jesus as Lord and Savior. They join in not merely as individuals but also as members of the corporate groups in which they have heard the gospel, and which each regards as his Church and, indeed, God’s. And yet, almost everyone, though in different ways, longs that there may be one visible Church of God, a Church truly universal and sent forth to the whole world that the world may be converted to the gospel and so be saved, to the glory of God [DV II, 341],

A major objective of Vatican II was the modernization, the bringing up to date, or, to use the now celebrated Italian noun, the aggiornamento of the Roman Catholic Church, so that it might present a fresh and attractive face that would be pleasing not only to the “separated brethren” but also to the world at large. As Pope John XXIII said in his speech at the opening of the council on October 11, 1962, “by bringing herself up to date where required, and by the wise organization of mutual cooperation, the Church will make men, families, and peoples really turn their minds to heavenly things” (DV II, 712). The Second Vatican Council gives formal notice to the world that the Roman Catholic Church is determined to play a full part in this ecumenical age.

It is important to understand, however, just what the involvement of Rome in this ecumenical age really means. There is no excuse for misconception, for Rome’s definition of its position has been explicit and frank. Far too many persons make the mistake of assuming, despite clear pronouncements on the matter, that the friendly attitude of the papal church to the ecumenical temper of our day implies that application for membership of the World Council of Churches cannot be indefinitely delayed. But this is very far from being true. And it is not without significance that of the documents of Vatican II, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church preceded the Decree on Ecumenism (and, probably, that these two documents were actually promulgated on the same day—November 21, 1964); for it is understandable that the attitude to ecumenism must be related to and governed by the doctrine of the Church. The attitude of Roman Catholicism toward the World Council of Churches has been stated with the utmost clarity by no less an authority than Cardinal Bea, the president of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, which was set up by Pope John XXIII: the Roman Catholic Church, according to him, “cannot, as has often been asked and desired, become a member of this organization which has a completely different character from the structure given by Christ himself to the Church he founded” (Christian Unity: A Catholic View, edited by John C. Heenan, p. 68).

As for those Anglicans who like to think they enjoy a more privileged position, let them heed the admonitory words of the new Catholic Dictionary of Theology, now in process of production, which declares that “amalgamation with the Church of England strictly so called or with the Anglican communion as a whole is, as anyone with the smallest knowledge of these matters knows to be the case, inconceivable,” and reunion between Canterbury and Rome can mean only one thing, namely, “that the Anglican communion, or some portion of it, great or small, should accept the supremacy of the Holy See and the doctrinal definitions of 1854, 1870, and 1950, together with those of the Council of Trent, and then be corporately admitted to Catholic fellowship” (I, 94).

Similarly, the Decree on Ecumenism announces it as a principle that Christ perfects his people’s fellowship in unity “in the confession of one faith, in the common celebration of divine worship, and in the fraternal harmony of the family of God,” through the faithful preaching of the Gospel “by the apostles and their successors—the bishops with Peter’s successor at their head—through their administration of the sacraments, and through their loving exercise of authority” (DV II, 344). In no way does Rome relax its claim to be the one true Church.

No longer, however, are those who are outside the papal fold dismissed as heretics; for “men who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are brought into a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church,” and “they therefore have a right to be honored by the title of Christian and are properly regarded as brothers in the Lord by the sons of the Catholic Church” (DV II, 344). The task of reunion, then, is to bring these erring brethren back into the perfection of that fold from which they have strayed. There can be no question of seeking and finding unity outside the only true Church or of accepting the World Council of Churches as a legitimate ecclesiastical structure. Vatican II makes it absolutely plain that there is only one road to reunion and that this road, restricted to one-way traffic, leads to Rome.

For it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the all-embracing means of salvation, that the fulness of the means of salvation can be obtained. It was to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, that we believe our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the New Covenant, in order to establish on earth the one Body of Christ into which all those should be fully incorporated who already belong in any way to God’s People [DV II, 346].

Roman Catholicism conceives its ecumenical task as being, in the first place, renewal of its own image, including the clearing out of the outdated lumber that litters its household and the reformulation, with dogmatic compromise, of its teachings where this can be done to advantage. It is emphasized that “there can be no ecumenism worthy of the name without a change of heart.” Repentance is necessary for sins against unity. “Thus,” the Decree on Ecumenism reads, “we beg pardon of God and of our separated brethren, just as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The decree goes on to say:

This change of heart and holiness of life, along with public and private prayer for the unity of Christians, should be regarded as the soul of the whole ecumenical movement, and can rightly be called “spiritual ecumenism.”

Another ecumenical requisite is the wish “to understand the outlook of our separated brethren”; as a means to this end, encounter and dialogue are warmly commended, particularly at the theological level:

Of great value for this purpose are meetings between the two sides, especially for discussion of theological problems, where each can deal with the other on an equal footing [DV II, 350].

The admonition is added that “nothing is so foreign to the spirit of ecumenism as a false conciliatory approach which harms the purity of Catholic doctrine and obscures its assured genuine meaning.”

Finally, cooperation of all Christians in social concern is encouraged, in such a way as to manifest “a just appreciation of the dignity of the human person,” to promote “the blessings of peace,” to apply “gospel principles to social life,” to advance “the arts and sciences in a Christian spirit,” and to use “every possible means to relieve the afflictions of our times, such as famine and natural disasters, illiteracy and poverty, lack of housing, and the unequal distribution of wealth” (DV II, 354).

The Decree on Ecumenism is refreshingly free from the ambiguity and double-talk that bedevil so many ecumenical pronouncements. Indeed, there is a striking contrast between this decree and what Hans Küng has described as “the colorless character of many of the theological pronouncements of the World Council and the feeble authority of its decrees” (Structures of the Church, p. 199). Although, naturally enough, there are many important matters in Professor Küng’s writings that we should wish to debate vigorously with him, yet we regard him as one who admirably exemplifies the new spirit by which Roman Catholicism is now so widely animated, and we applaud him wholeheartedly when he affirms that “the testing standard is not the status quo (itself to be tested) of the Church, but the gospel of Jesus Christ” (op. cit., p. 84); and again when he offers the following judgment:

Neither Catholics nor Protestants can consider themselves exempt from making a continuous effort to model themselves upon the apostolic Church. Neither do appeals to Catholic tradition or to the Protestant Reformation release them from the obligation constantly to realize anew that which is the crucial factor, if one desires the designation “apostolic”: namely, objective harmony with the apostolic message [op. cit. p. 98].

On this basis alone—the eternal Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, which at the same time is the authentic message of the apostles—is there a genuine possibility of charitable encounter, forthright speaking, fruitful discussion, and true ecumenical progress. And, however unacceptable by this same standard some of the absolute claims and demands of Rome may be, it is on this basis that we should wish to sit down and talk together. Vatican II has opened the door for just such an encounter, and we welcome it. But unless and until Roman Catholicism radically reforms itself in such a way as to bring its teaching and its practice into “objective harmony with the apostolic message,” we cannot be expected to set out on the Romeward road.

- More fromPhilip Edgcumbe Hughes

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Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette, at eighty-three, is still actively traveling around the world lecturing, teaching, and writing. Sterling Professor of Missions and Oriental History emeritus at Yale University, he is a patriarch among both church historians and Far Eastern historians. His autobiography “Beyond the Ranges” is scheduled to appear this fall. Readers will welcome this opportunity to learn Dr. Latourette’s assessment of the current religious situation, given in an interview conducted by Editor Carl F. H. Henry ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Q: You have always thought of Christianity in global terms, Dr. Latourette. How do you calculate the impact of Christianity and of Christ upon our generation?

Latourette: I am convinced that Christ has never been as widely and deeply influential in the world scene as he is today. First, because Christians—those that bear the Christian name—continue to grow in numbers. The global planting of Christianity in the nineteenth century was connected with Western colonialism and imperialism, and one would expect that with the passing of Western colonialism and imperialism and the Communist conquest of much of the world, these Christian churches would disappear. Exactly the contrary has happened. In no country, so far as I am aware, have Christians completely disappeared. They are still very strong in Russia. I’ve just learned that there are still Christians in North Korea.

Q.: The churches are closed down in North Korea.

Latourette: Yes, they are completely closed down, but the Christians are still living in the mountains and meeting in the mountains in small groups. And they continue in China. They have been dealt very severe blows there, particularly by this cultural revolution they’ve had lately. But we know there are Christians there, and we hear that some conversions are still being made—very quietly, but they are still being made. In some countries and areas, the proportion of Christians is rising. In India fifty years ago, we counted about one out of a hundred who called themselves Christians. Today Christians number about three out of a hundred, and the population of India has mounted from about 300 million to about 500 million.

Q.: Do you think that the swift growth in population will overtake these proportions?

Latourette: I think there is no indication of it now. South of the Sahara the number of Christians is growing very rapidly. They are still a minority; I think that of all African countries possibly only in South Africa would a majority call themselves Christians. In Indonesia a tremendous growth of Christians has been reported within just the last few months. We don’t know all the reasons for it, but we know the growth is taking place. In Japan the number of Christians has never been very large.

Q.: About one per cent of the population?

Latourette: About 1 per cent, or about one-half of 1 per cent in the proportion of church members. But a spot census not many months ago showed about three out of a hundred call themselves Christians, although many are not church members. And in various parts of the world there are gains. In Latin America, the great majority call themselves Catholics. But a friend of mine who taught theology in Chile, the late Father Gustave Weigel, when I first met him about fourteen years ago, said Christianity is dead in Latin America. I don’t think he would say that now—not even of the Catholic Church.

Q.: Here in America, Dr. Latourette, some theologians, let alone secular philosophers, are saying God is dead. What do you think about the present state of American Christianity?

Latourette: I think it is still very vigorous. Of course, as you know, the proportion of church members in this country has been mounting fairly steadily: about five out of a hundred when our nation became independent; about twelve out of a hundred at the time of the Civil War; to about twenty-five out of a hundred at the turn of the century. Today—if you include Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, and Jews, about two-thirds of the population call themselves members of a religious community—the vast majority of those being Christians. Now, how much of vital Christianity there really is, you can’t measure statistically.

Q.: I was going to say that you seem to place such a premium on numerical growth (and I suppose certainly one ought not to consider lack of growth an asset in Christian circles) that I wonder whether you really think Christianity is by definition a minority movement in relation to the world population?

Latourette: Of course it is. And with the present explosion of population, particularly in India and China, Christians or those who call themselves Christians are a smaller minority than they were fifty years ago. The proportion of those bearing the Christian name who are really Christian only God knows.

Q.: Do you think that just as in recent times there has been a global expansion of Christianity, so also there has been a global manifestation of anti-Christianity and anti-Christ?

Latourette: That’s not new. The historian as he goes back over the ages has seen that again and again. Today it has taken at least two drastic forms. One is the growth of Communism; the other, of course, the decline of Christianity in Western Europe—where nearly everyone is baptized and a good proportion are confirmed, but where for a large proportion Christianity is purely nominal. That has been going on now for a century. Since the industrial revolution, the population that has worked in the factories and the mines has never really been held to the Church. They are in both Catholic and Protestant countries; yet as far back as the eighteenth century and certainly the nineteenth century, most of those who worked in factories and mines were largely lost to the Church.

Q.: Do you think the Church has reason to lose heart because of the expansion of totalitarian Communism?

Latourette: Surely not. She has survived dark hours in the past. Islam tore away about half of Christendom about A.D. 700, and the rest of Christendom was threatened partly by internal decay and partly by waves of barbarians sweeping down from the north. And we ought not to forget the condition of the Church in fifteenth-century Europe.

Q.: If you were to venture a guess about the year 2000—and guessing, I suppose, is hazardous for a historian—how would you position Christianity among the world religions and ideologies at the end of this century?

Latourette: Well, as you know, I believe that our Lord may return at any time and bring this present stage of history to an end. That may well come between now and the year 2000. If he delays, my guess is that Christianity will continue to be more deeply rooted in indigenous leadership and indigenous movements, and among more people and in more countries than any other religion has ever been. You see, Christianity today is more widely distributed geographically than any other religion has ever been. There is no exception to that among the major religions of mankind—Confucianism, which of course is dying; Buddhism, which has been declining now for a long time; Hinduism, which is almost entirely confined to India; or Islam. Christianity is not only more widely distributed; it’s also more deeply rooted. It’s not a Western European phenomenon. That is seen in many different ways, of course, both in Protestantism and in Roman Catholicism. Within the last eight years, the East Asia Christian Conference has come into being through the initiative of East Asians and Southeast Asians. These Christians are not content to be just little ghetto communities; they are reaching out to win their own people to the Christian faith and sending missionaries to other countries. For example, not long ago a Filipino whom I knew had been a missionary in Iran. The Korean Christians have been sending missionaries to East Africa without financial assistance from Europe or America, and on their own initiative. And the number of indigenous clergy is growing. It is significant that during World War II, when missionaries were either imprisoned or killed or repatriated, in some areas the number of Christians grew. That was true in the Batak country in Indonesia; there all the missionaries were either imprisoned or killed or exiled, and yet they grew by about 100,000 during the war years and the period of Japanese occupation.

Q.: Apparently quite a vigorous revival is going on in Indonesia right now.

Latourette: Very much so. And the same thing is true in Burma. All the missionaries had to leave during the Japanese occupation, and yet among the largest of the non-Burman peoples, the Karens, the Christians grew in numbers.

Q.: They’re up in the mountains facing the Communist frontier, aren’t they?

Latourette: Some of them are, and some of them are in the south. There are other signs of new life in Asia, also. Studying at Yale this year we have a young man from the Naga hills of India whose father was a headhunter; he’s now planning to go back and teach the Bible.

Q.: Are there other features of Christian expansion in our time that give you some basis for optimism?

Latourette: Well, I’ve just mentioned a few in the non-Occidental world. But within the so-called Christian world new ventures are taking their place, as you know perfectly well. The great evangelistic meeting last year in Berlin, the World Congress on Evangelism, was something completely new; nothing of that sort had ever happened before. In Germany the evangelical academies are trying to deepen Christian commitment, and there are a number of other movements—such as Kerk en Werld in Holland, and the Iona movement. In our country about every week I hear of some new movement showing very great vigor, springing up largely among the laity as well as among some of the clergy, such as Faith at Work. And you probably know many other new ways that I don’t know about.

Q.: There are many cell groups, Dr. Latourette, and many new movements, some of them quite detached from organized Christianity and the institutional church but with a real feeling for New Testament realities and biblical truth.

Latourette: I’m glad to say I hear about a good many of them. And I’m not concerned particularly with the growth of institutions as such. What concerns me is that lives are transformed and Christians continue to meet together for prayer and fellowship and to witness to others.

Q.: What do you think is the essence of the Christian confession, Dr. Latourette? What do you believe?

Latourette: Well, I was taught, and I still hold to it very strongly, that the best brief summary is in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And later on in John’s Gospel, as you know, our Lord is quoted as saying, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” That seems to be the very heart of the Gospel.

Q.: What about affirmations of the early ecumenical creeds, such as the bodily resurrection and the virgin birth of Christ?

Latourette: Oh, I believe those myself. Of course they are very widely questioned among a good many people who, I think, are honestly trying to follow Christ. As a historian one has to examine his documents, and I’ve had to question them. But I personally believe that the historical evidence is for the virgin birth and for the bodily resurrection of our Lord.

Q.: You take a positive view, I understand, of the significance of the evangelistic impact in our time, such as represented by evangelist Billy Graham in the large crusades.

Latourette: Oh, yes.

Q.: Dr. Latourette, I understand that you are writing the history of the American Bible Society. Do you think that the Bible and the future of Christianity are closely interrelated?

Latourette: I believe the Bible is God’s Word, and of course the evangelical faith has been very closely linked to the Bible. We are celebrating the 450th anniversary of Luther’s starting of the Reformation. You remember that when he was hailed before the great dignitaries of church and state at the Diet of Worms, he said, “Unless I, Luther, am convinced by reason and by Scripture, I cannot retract anything I have said.” Of course he based his faith on that great passage in Romans, “The just shall live by faith.” Only he said “faith only,” sola fide. Paul got it from Habakkuk. You remember the kind of world in which that was first given. The writer of Habakkuk was almost driven to despair by great forces coming down from the north and destroying men with no regard for the weak and no regard for anything righteous. Why does God allow that? Why does he stand silent when the wicked gather to gobble up a man more righteous than they? And the word came to him, “The righteous shall live by his faith.” Incidentally, many years ago a colleague of mine lost his wife in pregnancy—Douglas MacIntosh, whose name you know.

Q.: Douglas Clyde MacIntosh, who wrote The Problem of Religious Knowledge and other books?

Latourette: Yes. When he had his turn at leading chapel, he said, “You wouldn’t expect me to ignore what’s happened since I was last here.” And he simply read from the last verses of Habakkuk: “Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet …

Q.: When you were president of the American Historical Society, Dr. Latourette, you gave quite an unusual president’s address.

Latourette: The title was: “The Christian Understanding of History.” What I attempted to do was to state what that understanding is, and then to state why I thought it is confirmed by history itself.

Q.: What light do you think Christianity sheds upon the history of our times?

Latourette: Well, I’ve often thought of those three parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew that our Lord gave. Remember, he talked about the wheat and the tares—the wheat and the weeds—growing together. They grow together until the harvest. I think that’s happened. Then he went on to say that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, and when it grows it becomes a tree and the birds lodge in it; and it’s also like leaven, that leavens the entire lump. Now both of those things have happened; all these three things have been borne out so far in history. Whether our Lord had that in mind when he gave them I don’t know, but they have certainly been confirmed historically.

Q.: What Christian ideas and ideals do you think have had a significant influence in shaping the American outlook?

Latourette: I could write a book on that.

Q.: Do you think that anything that distinguishes America among the nations is due to a Christian ingredient somewhere in its historical conditioning?

Latourette: Yes. You remember that the dollar bill has on its back the great seal of the United States, and part of it is a pyramid with the eye of God above it and the Latin words Annuit Coeptis, “He smiles on our beginnings.” Underneath is Novus Ordo Seclorum, “A new order of the ages.” Our founding fathers believed they were starting something new here. And of course Abraham Lincoln included in his Gettysburg Address the thought that ours is a great new adventure. Now that came out of the Christian dream, something new in this world—government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln defined it. I think that vision had a Christian origin. It’s not the only way in which we’ve been shaped. Of course, we’ve had many movements that were begun by Christians, often secularized as they go on. There was the whole movement for world peace that evangelicals in this country were organizing back early in the last century; this has issued now in our share in the United Nations. The U. N. would never have been but for the Christian dream.

Q.: In its origins it had more of a spiritual orientation than it now has?

Latourette: Yes. And of course the Red Cross. That was begun by Henri Dunant, a young man from Geneva who had a warm Christian experience in his youth. He was a businessman who was present at a big battle in northern Italy in 1859, and he was horrified at the lack of care for the sick and the wounded. So he wrote a best-seller describing it, and said, “Isn’t somebody going to do anything about it?” He and a number of other young Christian men from Geneva organized the International Red Cross. The symbol is Christian, but now it has become pretty well secularized. Both basketball and volleyball were invented by the YMCA to produce wholesome, physical life. Those are minor examples, but they have affected thousands of people. I rather think—though I can’t prove this—that the modern Olympic Games were initiated by Christians also.

Q.: Do you see any signs on the horizon in the present materialistic milieu of a new American creed, a defection from the heritage of the past?

Latourette: No, I don’t see that. Of course, there is a great deal of ignoring of that heritage, but there is also much remembrance of it. I happen to be an honorary member of both Kiwanis and Rotary in my home town, for example, and at each luncheon we solemnly rise and pledge our allegiance to the flag and sing “America” or “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “America” was written by a clergyman in his theological student days, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” by a very devout Episcopal layman.

Q.: What is your assessment of the spiritual state of the churches in America?

Latourette: It varies greatly. I don’t think one ought to generalize too much. I’m a little suspicious of this growth in church membership that probably means a watering down of the quality of church life. But that can’t be proved.

Q.: Do you think that the churches are sometimes onesidedly blamed for our problems in connection with racial tensions and other social problems?

Latourette: Yes, I think they are. But I think that’s partly a tribute to the churches. People expect something of the churches they don’t expect elsewhere, and when the churches don’t live up to that expectation, they blame them for it.

Q.: What are the weaknesses of American Christianity as you see them reflected among university students?

Latourette: I think that the student scene is more varied than I’ve ever known it in all my years of teaching and living at a university. Of those who are not Jews, the great majority who come have been baptized; and if they are in churches that confirm, they’ve been confirmed. But that doesn’t mean much to them; they are in the adolescent age when they’re questioning everything, including the faith in which they’ve been reared. On the other hand, I increasingly run across a number who are convincedly Christian, willing to face all the problems and the facts, and to witness—sometimes in somewhat bizarre ways and sometimes just quietly. In my student days at Yale, sixty years ago, practically everybody was a member of a church. Chapel was required; everybody went. My class voted to continue it. There were class prayer meetings after chapel which a few people attended, a declining number from freshman year on. Required chapel disappeared in the 1920s; there still is voluntary chapel; but there is no daily chapel for undergraduates. Sunday chapel is fairly well attended. And there are some prayer meetings when small groups of students get together, but nothing of a public kind. Whether that means a real decline in the average of Christian living on the campus I don’t know.

Q.: Are there any ideas on the horizon today that seem to spell danger for the churches?

Latourette: Oh, plenty of them. That is not new. Remember our Lord was crucified, and he seemed to die in frustration and failure.

Q.: So if you’ve sometimes been called an inveterate optimist, Dr. Latourette, it isn’t because you underestimate the power of evil in our time?

Latourette: I should say not. And as a historian, of course, I recognize that—as Paul said—to the Jew the Cross is weakness and to the intellectual it just doesn’t make sense, but the weakness of God is stronger than men. As a historian I’ve tried to ask how that has happened. And the foolishness of God is wiser than men. I have wrestled with that problem personally as well as in writing.

Q.: The Apostle Paul said that Christians are more than conquerors. Do you think, Dr. Latourette, that his statement needs to be revised in the twentieth century—that Christians are really an isolated and battered minority?

Latourette: No. Of course I think he meant there that individuals are more than conquerors, facing evil in many different ways, personal illness and bereavement and then great mass evil. But historical facts bear out that they are more than conquerors. They’re not just content to get through unscathed themselves. From them issue great purposes, and often in very strange ways. I didn’t know until a few years ago that President Franklin Roosevelt had Holy Communion in the White House on each one of his inaugurations—a friend of mine who had long been a missionary in China served him Holy Communion at the White House at least once. Roosevelt didn’t want to do it in public because that would be too spectacular. For all Roosevelt’s joking, he would never hear religion disparaged or joked at. Now I don’t know what the good Lord thought about Franklin Roosevelt; it’s not for me to judge. But there is the influence of Christ even upon that life.

Milton D. Hunnex

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“Non-Christian,” not “Post-Christian,” is the best description of their Gospel

One of the noteworthy characteristics of contemporary theology is its inability to decide whether man is a religious being who needs a supernatural God or a child of nature whose coming of age includes, among other things, a need to be emancipated from such a dependence. In the past, the second option was not open to the theologian. But today the secular theologian takes the second option to be the only plausible one. To be truly Christian, we are told, is to pursue a certain quality of the secular life unencumbered by old, supernatural ways of thinking. In fact, these theologians add, the Christian faith may be preserved only as we attempt to understand that faith in a non-supernatural, secular way.

“Secular theologians share a common presupposition,” writes sociologist Peter L. Berger. It is this:

The traditional religious affirmations are no longer tenable, either because they do not meet certain modern philosophical or scientific criteria of validity, or because they are contrary to an alleged modern world view that is somehow binding on everybody” [“A Sociological View of the Secularization of Theology,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Spring, 1967, p. 5].

Secular theologians deny the objective validity of the supernatural affirmations of the Christian tradition, and have a greater propensity to proclaim themselves atheists than the average theologically untrained skeptic, writes this observer. They are like the drunkard who carefully walks in the center of the gutter so that he cannot possibly fall into it.

As a cultural phenomenon, secular theology can be accounted for either as the result of attempts by liberal theology since Schleiermacher to accommodate Christian beliefs to the modern, scientific world or as the result of the influence upon theology of the forces that account for the modern world itself. Berger writes:

Secular theology must be understood as emerging from a situation in which the traditional religious certitudes have become progressively less credible, not necessarily because modern man has some intrinsically superior access to the truth, but because he exists in a sociocultural situation which itself undermines religious certitude [p. 10].

Relativizing secular theologians are blind to the relativity of their own debunking apparatus, he continues:

What … cries out for explanation is the fact that Bultmann and with him the entire movement [of secular theology] takes for granted the epistemological superiority of the electricity—and radio—users over the New Testament writers.… Secularized consciousness is taken for granted, not just as an empirical datum, but as an unquestioned standard of cognitive validity.… The question as to who is ultimately right in his knowledge of the world—Bultmann, the electricity-using man in the street, or St. Paul—is … bracketed in this perspective [p. 8].

Secular theologians try “to relativize the religious tradition by means of certain modern ideas,” but “these modern ideas … can themselves be relativized” (ibid.).

Begging the Question

Unfortunately, for the secular theologians, recent studies show that no safe generalizations can be made about what modern man can or cannot believe, to say nothing of what he ought to believe whether he is inside or outside the Church. According to one study, belief in God may run from a low of 40 per cent to a high of 99 per cent within Christian churches (Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Religion and Society in Tension, 1965). And these variations are reflected even in church leadership. Outside the Church the pattern is equally random. The secular theologian cannot justify his program of desupernaturalization on the grounds that supernaturalism is no longer generally tenable, since his own program for translating supernatural beliefs into psychology or existential anthropology is no less implausible for many others. The fact is that in our pluralistic society, substantial numbers of persons still believe in some kind of a god, more often than not the supernatural God of the Bible. Indeed, the conventions of ordinary speech call for a supernatural theistic God, and while this may sometimes entail a crude anthropomorphism, for most believers it does not. To speak of a “modern world view” that is somehow supposed to be normative simply begs the question and ignores the fact that many world views compete for the allegiance of modern man.

Naturalists Always Stumble

Conservative believers rightly note that biblical supernaturalism has always been a stumbling block for certain men. It was a stumbling block for naturalists of the ancient world no less than it is for naturalists today. But today the proportion of those within the churches who reject the supernatural is considerably larger. And it is upon this foundation that the secular theologians build their popular support, if not the specifics of their systems.

Since the supernatural has now become a stumbling block for so many within the churches, the secular theologian feels he must desupernaturalize the Christian faith in order to preserve its plausibility. He tries to show, for example, that biblical supernaturalism is one of the vestigial remains of a never-say-die “folk religion” peculiar to the vanishing American frontier or to a recrudescent Bible belt. He discovers that “being Biblical” or “being Christian” is really being secular in a special sort of way. But being these things in the ordinary, supernatural New Testament sort of way means living and loving according to God’s will as revealed in the Holy Scriptures and believing that God is all of those things that ordinary New Testament believers take him to be: the Maker of heaven and earth, the One in whom we live and move and have our being, a loving heavenly Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the One to whom Jesus prayed and to whom he was obedient unto death, the One who was in Christ as the Saviour of us all. The God of ordinary belief is real, personal, sovereign, and supernatural—whatever else he may be. For he could hardly be less and still be the God of Jesus, or of the first or contemporary Christians.

Moreover, despite the contention of some secular theologians, one can believe all these things without at the same time committing oneself to a non-biblical, Greek metaphysical system, or, for that matter, being “infected” by any of these systems. On the contrary, the metaphysical infections that some secular theologians find in ordinary orthodox belief follow generally from certain gratuitous assumptions that arise from their own enslavement to the philosophies of Heidegger or Feuerbach.

It is in the nature of the case that the secular theologian can only offer his program of accommodation and translation to naturalism as an alternative to biblical supernaturalism. He cannot use it to prove biblical super-naturalism untenable, for he cannot by his own relativistic reasoning show that his program is intrinsically superior as a “reality presupposition.” For the secular theologian, “the entire transcendental frame of reference of the Christian tradition is demolished,” Berger notes. “It is ‘translated into existential anthropology’—a procedure … of the most radical detranscendentalization and subjectivization imaginable” (p. 6). Moreover, radical accommodation of this sort tends to “escalate to the point where the plausibility of the tradition collapses … from within” (p. 13).

The conservative rightly recognizes this. He opposes secular theology not because he is unable or unwilling to consider new ways of understanding his Christian faith but because he rightly sees that “ever-deepening concessions to the reality presuppositions of the people one wants to keep or win … infect the thinking of the tactitians themselves” (ibid.).

Perhaps the most remarkable claim of the secular theologian is his poignant “discovery” that man’s final goal is freedom from God himself. The new gospel is: God died for us so that we can become ourselves. We are now wholly responsible, and we must embrace this responsibility and all the anguish it incurs as the mark of our Christian maturity. We must, for example, achieve the self-understanding that is authentic existence. We must take assertions like “Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour” to mean something non-supernatural like, “I henceforth understand myself … solely in terms of … my encounter with the kerygma,” as Ogden puts it (Christ Without Myth, p. 114). Any assertion that Jesus Christ is the only door to salvation must become the claim, for Ogden at least, that the non-supernatural God made known in Jesus Christ is the God who is found everywhere as the universal possibility of authentic existence for all men. From this perspective, the kerygma becomes a kind of existential emancipation proclamation. What was possible for the man Jesus, we are told, is possible for any and all of us. Even if there had been no man Jesus, the experience that was possible for the early Christians continues to be possible today.

How Secularists Aim

Secular theologians believe that we are standing at the frontier of a new, post-Christian era and that, like Abraham, we must set our sights by a new faith. To look back to the Christian world of the past is to follow the example of Lot’s wife. Strategy dictates the abandonment of a thoroughly discredited Bible and of irrelevant supernatural beliefs. The man of faith today is not the man who cherishes the words of the Apostle Paul or those of the Fourth Gospel as the Word of God. On the contrary, he is the man who moves into the world in a forthright, secular way to reshape it with the courage and confidence of a man come of age.

The notion of a supernatural God who acts according to his will must be gotten rid of. The word “God” can no longer be allowed to function in a supernaturalistic way. Talk about God must be seen as talk about man; viable theology must rely on existentialism or some other form of humanism rather than biblical supernaturalism. It is held that the Bible can no longer provide “living metaphors,” because its witness is the witness of another age and its propositions the understanding of that age. Hence, not only biblical propositions are rejected but biblical metaphors also. Theology must give way to anthropology even as supernatural Christianity has given way to humanism.

If secular theology is confronted with the charge of atheism, its defense will usually be that of the mystic. God will be pictured as the inward abyss or the encounter. Nothing affirmative will literally be said about him. But one of the main characteristics of Christian belief is that it is grounded on some very definite things that can be said about God and what he is supposed to have done. It is what we do know and can say, not what we do not know or cannot say, that justifies our faith.

Fashionable Subjectivity

The desupernaturalizing of theology has been accompanied by a subjectivizing of truth. There is a positive correlation between a diminishing reference to a sovereign objective, personal God and reference to truth as objective or specifically cognitive. After Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher, it became increasingly fashionable to speak of “truth as subjectivity,” as Kierkegaard did, or to reduce God and revelation to categories of human experience.

When Schleiermacher published his work On Religion—Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers in 1799, he made it a point to separate what he took to be the religious from the factual. He asked whether the religious could be factual in any but a subjective sense, whether such things as the truth claims of the Christian faith were in any way objective in intention as were the truth claims of science, for example. To put it in the words of David Jenkins:

We are to find the reality with which religion has hitherto been concerned in an attitude and policy towards the realities of the universe as known to science and the realities experienced in our dealings with the relations between persons. These exhaust the possibilities of reality that there are; and we are told that it is no longer possible to conceive of, still less to have dealings with, reality which is totally different from and transcendent of these realities. God is out, though godly attitudes may be in [Guide to Debate about God, p. 30].

The secular theologian wields a philosophical razor that says: “Do not multiply entities beyond existential or empirical necessity.” Do not introduce or require a supernatural Being, a Trinity, or anything that is not observable or is not essential to the existential situation. God is a Thou, a Ground, or an Ultimate Concern. We can believe this much about God. But shaving off supernaturalism makes it possible to speak about things like Tillich’s “new being” or Bultmann’s “authentic existence” without reference to God or Christianity at all. We can speak of thous, grounds, concerns, and so on, as aspects of human existence, but we do not even need to refer to them as God.

Thus, the razor devised to save the living God of the encounter from literal supernaturalism actually shaves him off. In this system, the word “God” is made to function as an adverb or an adjective rather than as a noun. We are to speak meaningfully of godly deeds and godly persons, but we may safely reject the biblical “thus saith the Lord.” Thus, what started as a move to preserve the living experience of God finds itself trying to keep that experience alive after God has gone. Subjectivity replaces objective belief and faith.

Note how Buber, whose influence has been enormous, makes his point. To speak of “I” or of “Thou” alone is to speak abstractly, to reduce the I-Thou encounter to an impersonal I-it relationship. But the I-Thou encounter itself is real. God is the I-Thou relationship. Hence, whatever may be the transcendent character of the encounter, it is itself what is meant by “God.” God is not in the encounter. He is the encounter. Interpersonal relations give us what we can now refer to as “God” without having to invoke—that is, to abstract—God. So far as we must use the word “God,” we must use it in this way.

Doctrine, on its part, is pictured as the symbolic vehicle of the encounter. The Scriptures point to, or witness to, revelation. They are not themselves revelation, since propositions about God—who he is, what he is like, what he has done, or what he commands and promises—are not the Word of God. What God says isn’t the Word, we are told, because God communicates only himself. The Word is a new self-understanding or a new dimension of our own existence. There is no supernatural incursion into our lives. Indeed, supernaturalism encourages the mistaken picture of an objective Being who reveals information about himself, his will, his plans, and so on. It is what sterilizes and ossifies the truth to which we should be continuously open and which we experience in the encounters of everyday secular life. For the secular theologian, it is immaterial whether Christian, Buddhist, or any other religion’s propositions and symbols are involved, since what finally counts is human existence alone.

When Faith Departs

The secularist’s alternative to supernatural New Testament faith will survive only so long as vestigial elements of that faith remain intact. When these are gone, the symbols he uses will be emptied of their power, and God will truly be dead for him. New symbols may emerge, but they will not be the symbols of New Testament faith. Nor will they possess their power.

Evangelical belief makes its witness one and the same as the witness of those who first proclaimed the Gospel. “I beg you to stick to the original teaching,” a New Testament writer pleads. “If you do, you will be living in fellowship with both the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:24, Phillips).

The historic Christian Gospel needs no speculative reconstruction. It is the good news for all time. There is no substitute for it. Nor is there any improvement of it. And that is why it is too important to be left to the secular or any other theologians.

- More fromMilton D. Hunnex

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One morning at seven, the time when I usually pass the White House on the way to my office, I saw a picket already keeping lonely vigil on Pennsylvania Avenue, bearing the message: “All I Want: JUSTICE.”

One mark of our theologically schizoid age is its readiness to hoist aloft one-word slogans for settling all the world’s ills.

The new morality unfurls its banner of Agape and considers all else dispensable. Love is, of course, an indispensable element of Christian ethics. But the specious notion that not divinely revealed principles and patterns of conduct but the immediate situation alone is to be definitive for one’s needs swiftly deteriorates Agape to Eros.

Others bear the banner of Justice alone; for them, Law dissolves Gospel, Justice conceals Agape.

Few today seem to hold together Romans 13 and First Corinthians 13, or Romans 3 and John 3.

But the God of the Bible is the God of justice and of justification.

For that reason, in opening the World Congress on Evangelism, I stressed: “The Christian evangelist has a message doubly relevant to the modern scene: he knows that justice is due to all because a just God created mankind in his holy image, and he knows that all men need justification because the Holy Creator sees us as rebellious sinners.”

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Russell D. Moore
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Hinduism	1.152 billion	15.1%

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Jesus referred to The Book of Enoch; “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” (Mat 5:5) pulled from “The elect shall possess light, joy and peace, and they shall inherit the earth. (Enoch 5:7 {6:9})” "Woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.

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Books of the Apocrypha. 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras (150-100 BC) Tobit (200 BC) Judith (150 BC) Additions to Esther (Vulgate Esther 10:4 – 16:24) (140-130 BC) Wisdom of Solomon (30 BC) ...
Books of the Pseudepigrapha. Epistle of Barnabas. 3 Maccabees. 4 Maccabees. Assumption of Moses (Testament of Moses) Book of Enoch.

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