Page 6022 – Christianity Today (2024)

Who Told You It Was Round?

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

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

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

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

What The Doctor Ordered

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

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

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

Bethel College

Mishawaka, Ind.

President

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

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

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

Broomall, Pa.

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

Arnold Lutheran Church

Duluth, Minn.

Right Relations

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

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

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

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

Elkhart, Ind.

Wesley’S Worry

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

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

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

The First Methodist Church

Palmer, Tex.

Love And Foreign Policy

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

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

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

Madison, Wis.

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

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

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

Harrisonburg, Va.

A Course Finished

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

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

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

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

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

Philadelphia, Pa.

The Depressing Truth

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

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

St. Paul’s Ev. Lutheran Church

Brookfield, Ill.

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

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

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

1. Is Montgomery merely a bad reporter?

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

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

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

St. Louis, Mo.

Review Reviewed

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

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

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

Wesley Theological Seminary

Washington, D. C.

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

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

Overlapping Areas Of Evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fragmentary Nature Of The Evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problems And Promise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When a Roman Catholic priest marries, the woman for whom he is willing to leave mother church is likely to arouse curiosity.

When last summer’s Poor People’s Campaign kept Ralph David Abernathy in Washington, D.C., it was wife Juanita who took his Atlanta pulpit to say his absence was only temporary.

Perhaps the minister’s wife (MW) most prominent in recent months is Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., who took up her assassinated husband’s concerns. Nearly as much a household word is the name of Catherine Marshall, wife of the late Senate chaplain, whose books are best sellers.

Few MWs find fame beyond their homes and congregations: those who do usually are known first because of the clergymen who married them.

What are they like, these women ministers marry? To describe them would take a book, and William Douglas of Boston University School of Theology has written it. Out of his experience as husband of a MW and from his survey of nearly 5,000 others, he has demonstrated in Ministers’ Wives (Harper & Row) that they are committed Christians happily involved in church activities despite the frustrations they frequently encounter.

Although Professor Douglas found similarities among the women he surveyed, their individuality was unmistakable and as variable as their personal situations. In fact, the more material he accumulated, the more variable MW’s situations appeared and the fewer generalizations about them seemed valid. Finally, he had to “focus … on how MWs (not the MW) perceived their own involvements in their husbands’ ministry and their satisfactions and frustration in these involvements.”

Twenty per cent of the MWs in his sample fit in varying degrees into a pattern as “teamworkers.” They serve independent Baptist or Pentecostal churches that rarely have more than 200 members, a fact that may help explain their involvement in as many as thirteen church activities. Team-worker MWs usually feel called to Christian service and find their busy lives very satisfying and fulfilling.

At the other end of the involvement spectrum, 20 per cent who are least likely to be from independent churches and most likely to be in urban churches call themselves “detached.” Douglas discovered that this group included the most individualistic MWs he encountered.

Between the poles are the majority who are very involved in their husband’s ministry, but less actively than the teamworker and more supportively than the detached. They are in medium sized (200–700 members) churches of several mainline denominations, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ. They may participate in five activities, but not as leaders; they feel more comfortable as disciples.

At the same time they work for a happy, secure, well-organized home that is a background of comfort and inspiration for their husbands. The fact that the minister’s schedule is irregular and his hours are long may force his wife to assume more responsibility for their children than she might otherwise take.

As the minister’s helpmate, Mrs. Stephen E. Smallman, of McLean, Virginia, “shares intensely in his triumphs and joys, his failures and discouragements.” And they “talk, talk, talk about everything, sometimes until the wee hours of the morning,” said that MW of three years. She added: “I try to be careful in what I say, knowing that he takes my opinion seriously.” A MW of twenty-one years, Mrs. John T. Holston, agreed: “Everything I say can affect him vitally.”

Sometimes they discuss his sermons. Once a week, the Rev. and Mrs. Raymond Ortlund of Pasadena, California, “escape together to a beach, park, or even hotel lobby in poor weather and he lets me share in his initial research on his sermon. Lucky me!” Mrs. Charles Ellis, of a Washington, D.C., suburb, offers “what I think are helpful comments for his future sermons.” And Mrs. James M. Boice of Philadelphia supplies “a word or two … to clarify a point.”

Some MWs help with counseling, usually on a rather informal basis. Others, like one San Francisco MW, “feel that should be very personal and confidential.” “His counseling is usually not discussed at home,” explained Mrs. Ellis, “but I guess he uses me for a sounding board sometimes.”

What motivates a MW’s involvement in her husband’s ministry? The answer Douglas found most frequently was the MW’s belief in the purpose of the church. A few were doing what was expected of them by their husbands, by the congregation, or by their own image of an ideal MW. For many, church activities contributed to personal spiritual growth. In general, Douglas found, if a MW’s motivation for her involvement is limited, frustration and conflict are particularly trying. But if her motivation is strong, she is usually able to cope even with heavy demands.

And MWs do face heavy demands. The minister’s income is rarely equivalent to that of an equally educated church member, but it must stretch as far. The MW may be able to economize by making her own and her children’s clothes, for example, but to do so probably means neglecting her housework. And if she does, the clerk of session and his wife will almost certainly drop by unexpectedly—sharpening (innocently enough) the MW’s conflict between trying to ease financial pressures and trying to be an efficient housekeeper and gracious hostess.

Another frustration stems from the fact that ministers and their families provide Sunday dinner conversation in many church members’ homes. If the preacher’s kid hits another child in the nursery, people talk about how he can’t control his own family. If the MW wears a new hat, people talk about how she squanders the money they give so sacrificially. If the sermon is particularly penetrating, people talk about a word the minister mispronounced or say he’s becoming too extreme. And the MW is sorely tried to remain an example of Christian love.

When church controversies involve others, the MW is likely to hear both sides. And she must walk a delicate diplomatic tightrope in order to avoid betraying confidences, creating cliques, or inspiring jealousies.

Perhaps hardest of all, MWs often have few close friends in whom they can confide despite those Mrs. Ellis described as “loving friends right there to help in any way they can.”

Yet most MWs would probably agree with Mrs. Stephen F. Olford of New York City that more money, leisure, privacy, and close friends “could never compare with the sense of achievement and soul satisfaction” of the ministry. “The demands on time, the problems and inconveniences go along with giving yourself to help others,” Mrs. Boice said, “and this one can do in a unique way in the ministry. I felt life was flatter and not as meaningful … when we were not in the pastorate.”

A large measure of their satisfaction comes, as Mrs. Robert Crew of Washington, D.C., said, “when you know you are in God’s will”; “anything short of it,” Mrs. Smallman agreed, “would make our lives incomplete and probably downright miserable!”

“More satisfaction?,” Mrs. Ortlund summarized. “Impossible. This is the sweetest, hardest, most demanding, most satisfying life I know.”

ADDISON LEITCH WEDS ELISABETH ELLIOT

On New Year’s Day, writer Elisabeth Elliot joined the ranks of ministers’ wives when she was married to the Rev. Dr. Addison H. Leitch. The ceremony was performed at New York City’s Brick Prebyterian Church by its minister, D. Reginald Thomas, and by the Rev. Richard K. Kennedy of Cheswick, Pennsylvania, a close friend of the groom. After the wedding, the guests—family members and close friends—gathered for the reception at the nearby home of the bride’s brother, author-teacher Thomas Howard.

Mrs. Leitch, widow of missionary Jim Elliot, who was killed by Auca Indians in 1956, was attended by her thirteen-year-old daughter Valerie. Best man was the groom’s brother, Robert, a Pittsburgh businessman.

One of evangelicalism’s few full-time woman writers, Mrs. Leitch, 43, is well known for her missionary books, including Through Gates of Splendor and Shadow of the Almighty, her controversial novel No Graven Image, and her biography of Kenneth Strachan, Who Shall Ascend. Scheduled for spring publication is her seventh book, reflections on a Holy Land visit.

The Leitches first met in 1966 when a mutual friend invited her to speak at Tarkio (Missouri) College, where Leitch has been distinguished professor of theology and religion and assistant to the president. Later, he invited her to lecture on the Book of Job.

Leitch, 60, whose wife of more than thirty years died last year after a long struggle with cancer, is presently on leave from Tarkio. The former president of Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary has been a frequent contributor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY, beginning with an article in its first issue and continuing as a columnist. For more than three years he was the anonymous scribe Eutychus II. In addition to teaching and lecturing, he has written five books and is working on a sixth.

Church Panorama

After seven years of talks, a joint committee from the American Baptist Convention and the Church of the Brethren says merger of the denominations is not a wise goal at present, though the ABC expressed concern for “ultimate union.”

Financial pressures may curtail admissions to Dr. Colin Williams’s program at the University of Chicago Divinity School which offers a professional Doctor of Ministry degree in place of the usual B.D. Dr. James Daane reports his similar post-B.D. program at Fuller Theological Seminary is “growing as fast as we care to see it grow.”

Florida Governor Claude Kirk announced the state’s biggest private land deal: the Mormon church plans to sell 260,000 acres of farmland near Orlando to General Acceptance Corporation for $100 million.

The Crusade of the Americas, with Southern Baptist evangelism funds, plans to show three TV shows in forty cities featuring Paul Harvey, Billy Graham, and Baptist musicians, coordinated with local crusades.

New Life Foundation of Houston plans to enlist 500 Baptists for a four-month evangelistic campaign in India this year. Meanwhile, India’s Methodists elected to life terms three new bishops who, with continuing American Bishop A. J. Shaw, will lead the church into the merged Church of North India if conferences approve later this year.

Eden Seminary Professor Allen Miller was chosen chairman of the North American council of the world Presbyterian-Reformed alliance this month. The alliance, which has been playing down denominational distinctives, is moving to re-emphasis on confessional families, perhaps to encourage Roman Catholic participation in world ecumenism.

President Robert V. Moss, Jr., 46, of Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Theological Seminary, is the unanimous nominating committee choice for new president of the United Church of Christ. A new president for the two-million-member denomination will be chosen at its General Synod in Boston June 25-July 2. Both Moss and current President Ben Mohr Herbster were clergymen in the former Evangelical and Reformed Church.

American Baptist chief executive Edwin Tuller, surprised at Minneapolis newsman Willmar Thorkelson’s prediction in Christian Herald that he’ll be the next president of the National Council of Churches, said he wants to see a Negro churchman in the job.

Father Vincent Capodanno, 38, a Catholic chaplain killed in Viet Nam in September, 1967, became the third chaplain from his communion to win the nation’s highest award, the Medal of Honor. He had voluntarily extended infantry duty and was killed when, severely wounded himself, he shielded a wounded man under attack by the Viet Cong.

Controversial Bishop Enrique Chavez, a member of the World Council of Churches Central Committee, was defeated for president of the Evangelical Council of Chile by the Rev. Francisco Anabalon, Jr., representing anti-Chavez forces. Anabalon pledged new cooperation and an end to secret meetings.

DEATHS

Canadian missionary pilot MENO VOTH; Mr. and Mrs. GENE NEWMAN, missionaries from Oregon, and three of their four children; in a Missionary Aviation Fellowship plane crash in the mountains of West Irian, Indonesia.

Pilot DONALD COLLINS, 33, nurse HANNA SCHMIDT, and student EDWARD WEAH of Worldwide Evangelization Crusade; in a veteran plane that crashed after takeoff from Monrovia, Liberia (a replacement aircraft had been held up by the dock strike).

VIRGILIO FILIPPO, 72, priest-politician who was known as former Argentine dictator Juan Peron’s “spiritual director”; in Buenos Aires.

LEONARD S. INGRAM, 92, British Plymouth Brethren bicycle-maker and missionary who distributed nearly two million books and pamphlets during six decades in Mexico and Latin lands; in Mexico City.

CHARLES M. WORTMAN, 76, missions obstetrician and later executive of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada for twenty-two years; of heart disease, in Toronto.

Miscellany

With a special U. S. government waiver, Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade plans a travel-study seminar in Rhodesia. And Hargis’s church in Tulsa, which he wants followers across the country to join, was granted tax exemption, though the Christian Crusade itself was not.

Despite efforts by nineteen religious and other groups, radio station WXUR in Media, Pennsylvania, owned by the American Council of Churches’ Faith Theological Seminary, won license renewal from the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC examiner cited free-speech guarantees for the station’s right-wing broadcasts.

National Association of Evangelicals President Arnold Olson reports Roman Catholics have agreed to Bible society rules for joint work: the Apocrypha will be separated and placed between the testaments in Catholic editions, and explanatory notes will follow Bible society categories and not include doctrinal material. Church of England evangelicals this month warned against any change in the Bible societies’ nonotes policy.

World Vision, working through the Evangelical Church of Laos (Christian and Missionary Alliance), won government permission to begin a relief program there.

Intercristo tried a new method for informing missions-minded college students. It got them to fill out sheets on their background and interests before a conference, then matched them with 1,250 job openings filed by participating missions.

A note in Martin Luther’s own handwriting went on sale in Germany for $5,000.

More than 100 leaders from most of Thailand’s evangelical groups met in Bangkok and announced a 1970 national follow-up conference to the recent Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism. The tense meeting showed a new sense of national unity, a reaction against the social gospel promoted by Western missionaries, and sensitivity to the place of the American dollar in evangelism.

The Haitian Coalition reports the Duvalier regime it opposes has hired Florida Pentecostal preacher Jack Walker as a roving “consul.” A major Duvalier newspaper says Walker’s friendship with Oral Roberts “is only the first step to Billy Graham, who in turn will present the problems of Haiti to his friend, President Richard Nixon.”

According to many Christians and non-Christians, some time after World War II the world and the Church of Christ entered the post-Constantinian or even the post-Christian age. Even though, as one Asian churchman pointed out at the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism, the majority of the world’s people is still in its pre-Christian age, having never heard the Gospel in any effective way, most American and European Christians are so Western-oriented that they fail to realize that most of the world, far from having outgrown the Gospel, has never even really found out what it is.

It would be wrong, therefore, to take the problem of secularization in the West and generalize about it for the whole world. Nevertheless, to the extent that we live in Western countries, in countries that are or were nominally Christian, that belong to what is loosely called “Christendom,” we should ask ourselves what it means to talk of a “post-Constantinian age” and of the disestablishment of Christianity or the secularization of civilization.

Christianity made its debut as a living faith at one of the great turning points of the ancient world, just as Rome was definitely changing from a republic to an empire (Augustus Caesar ruled from 29 B.C. to A.D. 14; the actual title of his successors was “augustus,” after the first Roman with imperial power). Christendom, or “established Christianity,” did not appear until three hundred years later, when another emperor, Constantine the Great (306–337), began to tolerate the Church and then joined it himself. This was also a historic moment for Rome, for it was Constantine who founded the second imperial capital of Constantinople and thus—despite his own wishes—formalized the splitting-up of the empire.

From having been “exiles of the dispersion,” as St. Peter called them (1 Pet. 1:1), the Christians became government officials; apart from the short reign of Julian the Apostate (361–363), even the emperors themselves were church members. Under Constantine’s predecessor, the ruthless and energetic Diocletian (284–305), a systematic persecution had seemed at the point of crushing the Church. A few short years later, the Church was enjoying not merely peace but privilege and power.

Peace and prosperity brought new problems, problems so persistent—sixteen centuries have passed since Constantine—that many churchmen seem happy to think we are now in the post-Constantinian age. What were these problems?

First, there was a flood of new “converts,” people rushing to follow the example of Constantine by accepting Christianity. Certainly many were interested more in the favor of the emperor than in the grace of God, though of course many others experienced genuine and lasting conversion. How many people today are members of Christian churches for no better reason than that one of their ancestors, decades or even centuries ago, thought it politically or socially useful to become a Christian? The disillusionment of so many Christians from young churches on their first visit to “Christian” Europe, or America is part of the bitter legacy of those millions who followed Constantine and other rulers into the Church for the sake of convenience, not conscience.

Second, the Church paid—and is still paying—a heavy price in integrity and in credibility for the power and prestige that Constantine and his successors gave it. From then on, right up to the present, the Church has found itself obligated to support the government, even to the extent of giving tacit assent or outright approval to governmental wrongdoing. That some outstanding church leaders, such as Ambrose of Milan and John Chrysostom of Constantinople, had the courage to defy emperors does not alter the fact that over the centuries the Church has regularly supported governments in power. Of course, Christianity is not responsible for Germany’s concentration camps or the American atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, the fact that “Christian” nations did these things, and that the churches of those nations kept on enjoying government favors while they were being done, certainly makes the task of the Christian apologist more difficult.

Now the Church apparently is being eased out of its old position of prestige and influence within the governing circles of Western nations. This is what is meant by becoming post-Constantinian, and a number of churchmen tell us it is a good thing. The modern Church should give up its secular privileges and powers, and Christians should again become “exiles of the dispersion.”

The Persistent Establishment

The strange thing is that membership in the “Establishment” is not so easy to drop. From Constantine onward, the Church has been taken into the circle of those who control secular power simply because the Church, quite apart from its spiritual worth, also represents a tangible secular power structure. Regardless of what they believe about God, political leaders take existing power structures into account. Even Stalin, who scoffed that the pope had no army divisions, recognized the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union because it could support him in his struggle to unite Russia against Nazi Germany.

Strange as it seems, Christianity or the Christian churches have remained a part of the Establishment even in many Communist countries. This is not because the Communists have taken pity on the Church, but because they find it more useful and less dangerous tó make use of existing Christian structures and to profit by their support than to drive them into direct opposition by outright persecution. Thus it happens that in several Communist countries the state pays the salary of the clergy. The churches, even though disdained and badly treated, thus have a certain “stake” in the Establishment and a certain influence on it. They pay for these favors by keeping religious opposition to Communism quiet at home and by promoting their governments’ policies on the ecumenical and diplomatic fronts. The anti-American speeches made by delegates from the Soviet Union at Uppsala were part of the dues their churches pay to belong, even in a subordinate and menial way, to the Establishment in the U. S. S. R.

Of course no churchman in a Communist country would dare to oppose his own government, for to do so would threaten not only his own existence but that of his church. But what about those churchmen in Western countries who have openly opposed their governments? Have they not given up their membership in the Establishment for the humbler, harder, and more honest post of exiled prophets crying in the wilderness? What about men like Robert McAfee Brown and William Sloane Coffin, who have vehemently opposed United States policies, in Coffin’s case even to the point of incurring a jail sentence?

To answer this question, we must again ask ourselves what constitutes the Establishment. In a monolithic, totalitarian state, there is a monolithic Establishment, but in a pluralistic society like ours, the Establishment too has many facets. On the one hand, it does take courage for prominent churchmen to speak out against official government policies. On the other hand, people like Professor Brown and Chaplain Coffin are speaking not for the disinherited members of our society but for a significant segment of the intellectual and financial elite. Stanford and Yale Universities are not exactly refuges for the underprivileged or for those who have and expect no voice in the councils of the mighty of our land. By continuing, up to the present writing, to lend moral support to Chaplain Coffin, even after his sentencing to jail, Yale President Kingman Brewster is not merely making a gallant defense of academic freedom; he is also demonstrating that the segment of the American Establishment that he represents considers itself strong enough to endure a test of strength with the officialdom of the United States government.

With all due respect for the moral integrity that may lie behind the decisions taken by Professor Brown, Chaplain Coffin, and others, we should realize clearly that their challenge to the current ruling authorities does not constitute a renunciation of political power for themselves of membership in the Establishment, made in order to be able to speak prophetically for change. Just as the Establishment is not necessarily conservative of any particular principles, but only of its own power, churches do not need to espouse so-called conservative political positions in order to remain part of it.

What is happening in the West then, as church leaders turn against traditional concepts of the open, democratic society and cast their weight behind “revolutionary” solutions to current problems, is not that the Church is stepping out of the Establishment. It is rather that the Establishment is moving, and the church leaders—at least those who do not want to lose their membership—are moving with it. Thus when Professor Brown of Stanford denounced U. S. policy in Viet Nam at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Uppsala, he was not—as he clearly stated—surrendering his claim to speak in the councils of the United States: he was specifically appealing to the international body to throw its support behind his own push to be heard there.

A Prophetic Role For The Church?

We are confronted, then, with a situation which church leaders, while adopting a posture of challenging society and its structures and of exercising a prophetic ministry, are in effect still playing party games within one durable Establishment. Just as the political standard-bearers of two programs for changed directions in American society—i.e., the New Frontier and the Great Society had themselves been prominent in its Establishment for decades, so the religious radicals come from the Establishment and go into the Establishment. Consider the positions of honor and the emoluments enjoyed by Bishop Robinson, Bishop Pike, Professor Harvey Cox, Professor Thomas Altizer—they hardly qualify as “voices crying in the wilderness”!

Being part of the Establishment, political, economic, social, and intellectual, is a liability for the Church and its message. To the extent that the Church (or the churches) shares in the power and privilege the world can offer, it must appear in some sense compromised, and its message loses credibility in the sight of the powerless and underprivileged. But the Church cannot break free of this entanglement with worldly power by playing off one faction against another, by betting on one program, policy, or party rather than another. As long as it is in the world, the Church can hardly escape some kind of Establishment ties. As long as it attracts people and their loyalty, it will build up a kind of political, social weight that will qualify it in some way to join in the mechanism of political and social power. God does not require the Church to shun every link with the Establishment. To do so, it would have to follow the radical example of the Desert Fathers or of the Anabaptists—and society proved able to domesticate even its monks and its Mennonites within a generation or two.

Integrity, credibility, and a prophetic ministry for the Church will not come from renouncing all ties with the secular Establishment. The slogan that the Church should go into the world and serve the world, renouncing its special status, its “clericalism,” its other-worldliness, is simply another technique for integrating it more effectively, as an existing power structure, into the greater power structure of secular society and government.

The Church can never free itself from entanglement with the body politic any more than the individual Christian can free himself from his body, but it can rise above this entanglement. It can do so if and only if it possesses something that comes from beyond the temporal horizon, something that is not just a part of the interplay of social, economic, and demographic factors. It is the inestimable privilege of the Church of Christ that it does possess such a thing: the Word, which comes from the mouth of God.

The more complex and chaotic the current social and political situation becomes, the more it demands radical solutions from the church. But such radical solutions must come from the radix, the root, which is the eternal and authoritative Word of God. Solutions that come from the branches of the human contemporary situation, the entanglements, the symptoms, can never be genuinely radical and can never be prophetic.

This is the error that was made so often at Uppsala, and it is one reason why the World Council’s attempts to speak to the world fell on deaf ears. The Old Testament prophets were not prophets merely because they spoke out: even the Saturday Evening Post did that. They were prophets because they spoke mippî YHWH—out of the mouth of the Lord. They spoke the words of the One who stands beyond the temporal horizon, the One who is competent to judge and to redeem man and his manifold Establishments.

The church cannot get out of the human Establishment. We have seen that it takes a revolution even more radical than that of Soviet Communism to exclude the Church completely. But it must not merge into the Establishment. It must not, in other words, accept this world’s criteria for solving this world’s problems.

By claiming to speak for man in a fully human situation, the Church is in effect speaking for no one but itself and its own status in the Establishment. By so doing it perverts its own heritage, which is precisely the Word spoken by the Eternal, and it misunderstands what it means to be fully human, namely, to be responsible to God and to trust him.

What this means, in concrete terms, is the exact opposite of the slogan of certain ecumenists, “Follow the world’s agenda.” It must be, “Follow God’s agenda!” That means, for individual Christians and for churches, within the ever-present Establishment in human society, to speak God’s Word more clearly, more distinctly, and less compromisingly than ever before. The Church—and not only the Church but also the world—has need of witnesses, not to man and his dreams, but to God and his reality. Such a course will not be easy. It may involve rejection by the whole Establishment, as it did for St. John Chrysostom, and not rejection by a part and adulation by another part, as so often happens to our religious “radicals” today. But that is a different thing from rejecting the Establishment, or from playing off one portion of it against another.

Persecution cannot destroy the Church, but becoming established can domesticate it to the world. Establishment is not something one can avoid by taking sides with current “outs,” for it is always their goal to become the “ins.” Entanglement with the Establishment cannot be escaped, but servitude to it can be: by a deeper, more conscious, and more obedient subjection to the Word of God. In human society, the Establishment has many shapes and faces, and one can be found in it and paying one’s full dues even when one is protesting against it most vehemently. It is not the loudness of our protest that guarantees our spiritual freedom but the clarity with which we hear the voice of God speaking in Scripture and the obedience with which we heed him.

Man’s constant struggle to understand himself and to relate himself to a swift-moving world prompts him ever and again to articulate both his self-image and his role. Several factors in contemporary life join to underscore the urgency of the theological task at this point.

Those of us who pursued our seminary studies with representatives of the movement calling itself religious humanism are inclined to ask, Where has the older humanism gone? One thinks especially of that form that was articulated in the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 and by J. A. C. Fagginger Auer in his Lowell Lectures for 1932.

Dr. Auer viewed man on the threshold of the second third of this century as shut up to one real option, that of “Prometheus struggling against the gods in his own right.” This point of view was dealt what seemed a death blow by the massive forms of “man’s inhumanity to man” under Nazism and Sovietism.

At the same time, man’s continuing concern with himself lays every generation under obligation to deal with the question, “What is man?” Professor Roger L. Shinn has rendered us a distinct service in the publication of his 1968 volume, Man: The New Humanism, the sixth volume in the series “New Directions in Theology Today.” In this work, it is suggested that new forms of humanism are emerging, each in close liaison with theological inquiry, and resting upon changing developments and changing insights into the human predicament.

Professor Shinn sees the change of mood that has occurred in the past thirty-five years summarized by the differences between the Oxford Conference of 1937 and the Geneva Conference of the World Council of Churches in 1966. The former, under a crushing sense of man’s sin, called the Church to the task of reconciliation in the world, but from a posture of transcending the world. The latter, eager and militant in the assertion of man’s dignity, called for the immersion of the Church in the world, for the purpose of the humanization of human life and human institutions.

The newer humanistic trends expressed in the latter mood stemmed from several cultural-historical circumstances, notably the following: man’s technical achievements, man’s new awareness of more recent assaults upon human dignity, the threat of the loss of “humanity” before technological development, a renewed awareness of the problems inherent in the sacred-secular dialogue, and the “discovery” in biblical studies of humanistic dimensions for theology. Taken together, these seem to suggest the necessity for new life-styles in theological formulation. These will involve, it is said, new dimensions in man’s self-estimate—and will issue in new humanisms related closely to the mood of the age.

The definition of humanism proposed in Man: The New Humanism is in terms of “the appreciation of man and of the values, real and potential, in human life. It esteems man—not as an animal, a machine, or an angel, but as man.” It follows that newer humanisms are concerned with the entire range of human concerns, and more especially, with the secular dimensions of man’s life. “The secular” has encountered many difficulties since 1937, and is seen to have triumphed in the contemporary “celebration of the secular” that is an essential ingredient in the orthodoxy of the New Worldliness.

Inevitably the statements of Bonhoeffer, notably those in his letters written from prison between June 8 and July 21, 1944, figure prominently in the “rejoicing in this world” that seems typical of the emerging forms of humanism. Bonhoeffer doubtless had a point in demanding that we cease using God as “a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.” But he may prove to be very wrong in his claim that modern man is a qualitatively unique being who can now manage very well without God. While man has learned to do for himself a great many things that he formerly called upon deity to do (and the Christian acknowledges these achievements gratefully), it is far from certain that man has no residual problems of overpowering importance for which he needs a divine solution.

The newer forms of theological humanism show marked differences from the theological style of the religious humanists of the thirties. There is a renewed appreciation of man’s inner experiences, factors that the older humanism viewed with a jaundiced eye. There is likewise a recognition that man is less free, and less the master of his own destiny, than was assumed by the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.

Recent styles of humanism share some insights of existentialism, while at the same time reserving the right to criticize other of its features. Newer humanisms emphasize “man in his actual existence, not in abstraction,” and stress personal freedom as an indispensable ingredient of humanness. At the same time, there is a questioning of the individualistic and introverted qualities of existentialism. The latter is felt to be too romantic in its idealism, too willing to settle for withdrawal and passive alienation.

While the robustness of the religious humanism of the thirties is sharply modified by the formulators of the humanisms of our decade, these are unwilling to accept the existentialist alternative of cultivated anxiety, or its amorphous and private understanding of the category of authenticity. The real problem is whether political activism can furnish an adequate set of concepts and symbols for a religiously based form of humanism.

This raises the more basic problem of definition. Is man correctly understood, not as homo religiosus, but as a creature who can be understood exclusively by reference to himself? Again, is man to be defined simply in terms of a group of creatures with homogeneous needs and desires, as “closed” forms of humanism assert? Or must he be seen in more “open” and ecological terms?

The answer to these and related questions will need to be found in the larger contexts within which newer humanisms are drawn. That is to say, much will depend upon whether a theistic or a non-theistic “style” is assumed and accepted. If the architects opt for the latter, and accept for their platform the shared belief in the possible self-perfectibility of man, the “new” will scarcely be better than the “old.”

If, on the other hand, the dimension of man’s need for God’s grace is placed at the heart of the humanism-style, and if human life is acknowledged to be lived always “under God,” then a wrong-headed form of human autonomy may be avoided. What is at stake is whether or not man is willing to be brought to newness of life through Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians know as Christ the Lord.

HAROLD B. KUHN

The Washington air was charged with excitement as workmen built the stands for the inaugural proceedings. We noted their progress from day to day and hoped to watch January 20 the parade from our tenth-floor office windows, a block from the White House and directly on the parade route. That was about the closest we got to being part of it all—except that prior to the big day the office served as temporary repository for the striped pants and homburg of Billy Graham, who was asked to offer the inaugural prayer.

As we watched the festivities we could not help musing on the fact that the occupant of the White House has only a four-year lease, renewable by the electorate but once. Mr. Johnson left without asking for a renewal. So the transition took place, and life goes on much as before.

One interesting change was the selection of Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, minister of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington and contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY since its inception, as chaplain of the United States Senate. Kudos is due him for the honor that is his, and our prayers are offered on his behalf as he undertakes this spiritual ministry.

Five days before George Washington was sworn in as first President, the Senate acquired its first chaplain. Just short of 180 years later it swore in his fiftieth successor, the Rev. Dr. Edward L. R. Elson of Washington’s National Presbyterian Church. Five other Senate chaplains have come from the same congregation.

Elson says, “I am deeply sensitive to the awesome responsibility of standing in the midst of power, representing One who rejected raw physical power in order to make available to all mankind a higher power.”

But Elson, who baptized President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, is used to being in the midst of temporal greatness, and as his wife Helen put it, his post ought to be “a natural development” of his ministry in the Capital. Eisenhower attended his church regularly for eight years, and its rolls include a wide sampling of official Washington.

Elson succeeds the ailing Rev. Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, 83, who resigned after serving as the Senate’s spiritual shepherd since 1942, save for two years when Peter Marshall held the office.

His counterpart in the House is the Rev. Dr. Edward Latch, a Methodist who was family pastor to then Vice-President Nixon.

Senator Lee Metcalf (D.-Mont.), a Methodist, had nominated the Rev. Dr. Edward B. Lewis of Capitol Hill Methodist, but Mississippi’s Senator John Stennis (D.-Miss.), an elder in Elson’s church and leader of the weekly Senate prayer breakfasts, nominated his pastor. The Democratic Caucus had a potentially ticklish situation on its hands, but despite strong feelings, harsh words were not uttered behind the closed doors. Elson won a two-year term, 28 to 20, over Lewis, who was Harris’s frequent standby.

Outside the closed doors, however, all was not as irenic. One senator loudly protested that Elson’s brother Roy—longtime aide to retiring Senate President Carl Hayden (D.-Ariz.) and unsuccessful opponent of Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Ariz.) for a seat as Hayden’s successor—had dropped the hint that his brother was up for consideration and that any favorable response would be appreciated. Lamented the disappointed senator: “This kind of power certainly didn’t hurt Elson’s chances.”

The part-time post (Elson continues as pastor at National Presbyterian) pays $17,500, compared to the $2,320 paid in 1949.

The Nixon inauguration marks the second time for Elson on the inaugural platform. Twelve years ago, as Ike’s pastor, he watched Nixon take the oath as Vice-President.

Mrs. Elson, District of Columbia Mother of the Year two years ago, recalls how the Nixons were their neighbors in his vice-presidential days, and daughters of the two families were in the same Scout troop.

Elson, 62, a native of Monongahela, Pennsylvania, is an evangelical well known for his strong belief in the “God and country” charism. As a staunch defender of U. S. policy in Viet Nam, two years ago he led a successful fight in Washington Presbytery to defeat a resolution calling for immediate cessation of bombing and negotiations aimed at American withdrawal.

A strong admirer of fighting Harry Truman, he has held strongly to the Truman Doctrine, which tightened the line against Communists in Lebanon, Greece, Turkey, and Korea. This, he said, shows that “history has made a turning point in favor of American civilization.”

As a leader in a denomination torn between the conservative and the liberal theological and social stance, Elson has sometimes gotten into trouble with fellow Presbyterians. His identification as a contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, he said, proved part of his undoing when he was being considered for the post of moderator of the denomination.

Elson graduated from Asbury College, a holiness Methodist institution, and took his master’s at the University of Southern California. He holds sixteen honorary doctorates.

Elson is always busy; among other tasks Of late he’s been writing a book on Eisenhower. Maybe that’s why he keeps most of his Senate prayers short—something many senators appreciate. Elson said he usually arrives about an hour before the Senate convenes, stays on the floor a while after the prayer, then mingles with the official Senate family.

He plans to be homebound more with the new job. “Now I can concentrate my extra-parochial energies in one place.” The place is Room 220 in the Old Senate Office Building, looking out over Constitution Avenue.

THE CHURCH AT 1600 PEHNSYLVANIA

What may be a White House first was scheduled for the first Sunday of President Nixon’s stay in the White House—an interdenominational worship service in the East Room. Nixon dislikes having the limelight thrown on his worship, and also the intricacies of security involved in the family’s attendance at a local church. The White House service will probably be held frequently, though not every week. It will be open to all the official White House family and will reflect in large measure their shades of religious belief.

Longtime friend and confidant Billy Graham is expected to play a major role in keeping the program moving, and probably will be a frequent speaker.

Tennessee Williams Converts

Tennessee Williams, known for “earthy” plays, is nearing the end of what he considers his path to heaven. He planned to be in Rome this week with letters of introduction to Pope Paul VI.

The final leg in Thomas Lanier Williams’s spiritual odyssey began on Epiphany, January 6. Badly shaken by the death of his friend Tallulah Bank-head and by a serious case of Hong Kong flu that brought into focus a decade-long fear of death, the 57-year-old writer, who believes he has had personal brushes with the devil or the spirit of evil, sent his brother to fetch a priest.

Over glasses of Scotch, the Pulitzer Prize-winner told Jesuit Joseph LeRoy of a memorable experience at Cologne Cathedral in Germany during which “the grace of God touched me.” Encouragement came from his brother, William Dakin Williams, who converted to Catholicism during World War II.

The priest and the playwright met several times during the week to discuss the confession of faith required for converts. Tennessee paused over belief in immortality until Father LeRoy read Jesus’ words in John 11:25, 26: “I am the resurrection.” Declared Williams, “If that’s what the Lord said, I believe it.”

Although Williams was baptized as an infant in the Episcopal Church, LeRoy rebaptized him January 11 at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Church in Key West, Florida. Afterward Williams entertained the guests at the service with dinner at his home, where he and the priest exchanged books. Father LeRoy gave Williams a copy of No Man Is an Island, by the late Thomas Merton, whose writing Williams admires. The playwright gave the priest a book containing three of his plays. On the flyleaf he wrote: “Dear Father Joe, Faith is in our hearts, or else we are dead.”

Tennessee, who calls himself a Catholic writer, considers his last half-dozen plays Catholic because, more than earlier works, they deal with the conflict of evil and good. But his best plays are yet to come, he believes, because his conversion will aid his writing.

ADON TAFT

The Lunar Devotions

What prompted the Apollo 8 crew to read the Bible and pray as part of their telecasting from the moon?

The story behind the historic lunar Christmas Eve “service” witnessed by untold millions began to unravel this month when the astronauts met newsmen in Washington.

The initial query came from NBC reporter Roy Neal: “To us here on the earth one of the real highlights of your mission was your reading from Genesis. Can you give us some background on that—where the idea came from, how you handled it?”

Air Force Colonel Frank Borman, the flight commander, replied: “Yes, Roy, we can. We were, of course, aware that we were going to have television on board the spacecraft.… Having had television, we said we wanted to do something significant, because here we are around the moon on Christmas, and so on.

“And we consulted with friends. We thought among ourselves. We first thought perhaps it would be more of the ‘one world’ theme where we would tell everyone on earth that, gee whilliker, we are living on one earth. But then one of the suggestions was to read the first ten verses of the Bible, and that seemed so appropriate and so simple that we adopted that.”

Decision magazine reports in its February issue that the desire to have Scripture aboard the spacecraft was a matter of prayer for a Gideons group that meets each Monday morning just outside Houston. One member of the group, Bass Redd, chief of the flight technical branch of the Manned Spacecraft Center, was said to have been told by NASA authorities that it was up to Borman. When Redd asked Borman in early December whether any thought had been given to Bibles, the astronaut reportedly replied, “No, and I’m glad you reminded me of it.”

The Gideons then secured New Testaments with non-combustible covers for Borman and his flight companions, Navy Captain James A. Lovell, Jr., and William A. Anders, now a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. Lovell and Anders reportedly took along their New Testaments, and Borman took a Bible of his own. Borman’s Bible was identified as the one from which the spacemen read while on television. The slight pauses between their readings were attributed to the time it took to float the space-weightless Bible from one man to another.

At the Washington news conference Borman was also asked what, beyond the Bible reading and prayer, was the religious significance of the flight.

He said that “the religious significance of the flight, at least personally to me, was the opportunity to view firsthand this mass of matter that perhaps will unfold some of the secrets as to how everything started.”

Borman added that “I don’t think that any of us could undertake—I’m not aware of any man that could undertake this kind of journey without some belief—or at least I couldn’t—and so it was a fulfillment for me of a very basic belief.”

Earlier, in a speech at the Capitol, Borman jestingly noted that one of the lesser-known accomplishments of the flight had been getting “good Roman Catholic Bill Anders to read the first four verses of the King James Version.” (Borman and Lovell are Episcopalians.)

Borman also needled members of the Supreme Court, who sat directly below him, for their ban on public-school prayers: “Now that I see the gentlemen in the front row, I’m not so sure we should have read the Bible at all.” After the speech Borman was greeted by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The astronaut later described Warren’s words as “pleasant.”

Who’S Hughes

Out in Iowa, where freshman U.S. Senator Harold Hughes comes from, farm wives mix all their spices together in some flour, put it in a paper bag, toss in the chicken pieces, and jostle the bag a minute or so. Hughes has done the same thing with his fundamentalist Methodism.

Yet with all the spicy accretions to orthodoxy, the three-term Democratic governor of Republican Iowa reduces ultimately to an evangelical with a let-all-the-good-guys-in approach.

Winsome, handsome Hughes lives and breathes politics. He also lives and breathes religion, he made clear in an interview during his first hectic week on Capitol Hill. He thinks politics and religion ought to go hand in hand. But Hughes is no mere do-gooder. His record shows a hard-fisted, realistic approach. He’s willing to look for the utopian in the Senate, but is amenable to programs offering something less that have meaning for the here and now. His home-state experiences with liquor and regulation serve the point well.

“I’ve been an alcoholic from my birth,” Hughes unhesitatingly admits. “To me to drink was to die.” High-school-age restlessness and college-day socializing at the University of Iowa (he dropped out to marry and go to war after the first year) made him push his mother’s fundamentalist strictness aside, and the disease began taking its toll. After the war, while driving trucks for a living, Hughes found help in Alcoholics Anonymous, this time for good. “I quit 300 times before, and every time I meant it. I wanted to swear off desperately.”

Conservative Iowa was a dry state until maverick Hughes took the governorship. In view of the nightmarish experiences behind him, his fellow Hawkeyes might well have thought the dries had the referendum in the bag. Not so. Hughes came out strongly in support of making liquor legal, and it won decisively.

“If I could do away with liquor by pulling a switch, I would certainly do it. But I can’t,” Hughes reflected. “I was tired of my boyhood days as a Methodist where once a year we heard a Temperance Sunday hellfire-and-brim-stone message against liquor. But, hell, nobody ever did anything about it. There was open violation of the law all over the place.… In fact, the Des Moines Register found that their reporters could buy drinks illegally in seventy-seven of ninety-nine countries.”

Already the Senator has made prayer at the Congress prayer room a regular practice. “Prayer is a matter of life to me.… It is a more powerful force than the hydrogen bomb.” The licensed Methodist lay preacher and former church bass soloist says he has visions and some of the charismatic gifts. “Everyone could have these gifts,” he said, “if he’d only let go and let God open up the channels.”

Among his associations, he seems to take special delight in the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, which explores seances and other parapsychological phenomena. Hughes said the organization has served most in expanding his spiritual awareness. Travel out of the provincial context of his native Ida Grove (he pronounces it Idy Grove), intellectual religious inquisitiveness that was “sinful” when he was growing up, and appreciation of others’ religious experiences have broadened his purview.

Although he has set aside some of the strict teachings of his own boyhood, Hughes believes strongly in the primacy of the home. “Many of the problems wrong with us today as a nation exist because there has been an abdication of home responsibilities, making people void in church response. We need proper instruction to develop the whole person.” Laying the stress to his conviction, Hughes seldom makes a political engagement on Sunday. “That’s reserved for church, home, and family.”

WILLIAM WILLOUGHBY

Barnhouse And Boice

When James Montgomery Boice was a lad, family pastor Donald Grey Barnhouse once mused with the Boice family that all the long-tenure preachers at his Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia had last names beginning with B. And maybe James would someday join the string.

Last year, at age 29, he did. And in March Boice also takes over the radio “Bible Study Hour,” currently broadcast on ninety stations, which gained prominence in Barnhouse’s pulpit heyday.

The late Dr. Barnhouse, an old-style meticulous expositor, became known for taking a decade to work his way through the Book of Romans on the radio broadcasts. And Boice, who began his Philadelphia preaching last May with Philippians 1:1, had only wrapped up chapter 2 by this month.

Whatever the similarities in theology and style, Barnhouse was ever the loquacious platform personality, while Boice, less self-assertive, personifies the cool scholarship of the 1960s. He holds a Harvard B.A. in English, a Princeton B.D., and a Basel D.Theol.

Before going to Tenth Presbyterian, Boice was assistant editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and his boss there, the Rev. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, is doing this month’s “Bible Study Hours.” (Series speaker Ben Haden quit suddenly last August, and some substitutes have been used.)

Besides straight preaching, Boice’s programs will answer listeners’ questions and feature interviews. Two early ones are with other Boice mentors: former Stony Brook School Headmaster Frank Gaebelein (who was phoned by Barnhouse one fall to permit last-minute admission for young Boice), and Princeton Professor Bruce Metzger, who will comment on scholarly problems in dating the pastoral epistles.