Page 5844 – Christianity Today (2024)

Pipe Dreams

The other night I was sitting in a church committee meeting when one of the members pulled out his pipe, stoked up, and began puffing away contentedly.

I sat there in awe of his adroitness, remembering my own attempts to take up pipe-smoking. It all began when I noticed the aura of savoir-faire and erudition that emanated from even my most bone-headed friends when they lit up a pipe. Their normally jejune comments suddenly became profound and weighty when they were balancing a pipe between their teeth.

Must be something to the habit, I thought. So when I came across a special offer of pipe and tobacco in the drugstore I was ready. Attached to the pipe was a booklet designed to initiate one into the mysteries of sucking air through smoldering leaves.

The booklet pointed out that it’s first necessary to char the inside of the pipe by smoking a bowl full of tobacco down to the last ash. What it failed to mention was that the process of charring the bowl destroys the lining of your mouth and brings on paroxysms of expectoration.

It also detailed the importance of packing the tobacco properly so that it would burn well. I tried several different degrees of packing. First the tobacco would be too loose and wouldn’t burn. Then it would be too tight and air wouldn’t come through it. So I bought a pipe tool with a blade for loosening up the tobacco and a tamping end for packing it down.

For a while I practiced pipe-smoking on weekends. I was still too uncoordinated to try it in public. Then one day I had to attend an all-day meeting that involved sitting for hours listening to boring speeches. A pipe-smoker’s dream. I could hardly wait. Once the big day had arrived and I was settled in the meeting, I whipped out my trusty, properly charred pipe. With a cavalier gesture I filled it with tobacco, tamped it down with my pipe tool, and drew out the matches.

It was a small box of wooden matches cribbed from a hotel as the perfect sort of thing for lighting a pipe. I rubbed the match across the sandpaper side of the box and was rewarded with a red streak across the striking surface and a plain wooden stick in my hand. Moisture had gotten to them.

Undaunted, the next day I purchased a waterproof match case. But I didn’t try smoking again for several weeks. Then one bright Saturday it seemed the pipe would be a perfect companion as I worked in the yard.

With pipe, tobacco, and nice dry matches, I returned to the yard. I filled the bowl with tobacco and started to pack it down. There was a crackling sound; the tobacco had dried out. Next day I purchased a pouch and humidifier to keep the proper moisture. That was followed by various accessories—pipe cleaners, a humidor, a rain cover.

On subsequent occasions as I continued to try to master the art I found that I always seemed to have some combination of two—pipe and tobacco, tobacco and matches, matches and pipe—but never all three. I know well the meaning of being unable to get it all together.

There were also other minor tribulations—pockets filled with tobacco, ashes in the eyes, and burned fingers.

Finally I gave the whole thing up, having offered relatively few burnt offerings to the goddess Nicotine.

Friends, be careful of the masters to whom you submit yourselves. Their service is usually far more demanding than it first appears.

EUTYCHUS V

INTELLECTUAL ANSWER

Let me take this opportunity to express my thanks for the work you are doing. I began subscribing just over a year ago.… I soon discovered that your magazine was the answer to something I had been wondering about—did there exist a publication that treated contemporary social, political, scientific issues from a strong evangelically sound viewpoint while being academically fair to the subjects treated? After reading treatments of subjects by well-intentioned but unqualified persons, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a relief. Its comforting to know as I read an article that touches on psychology, sociology, science, politics, or whatever, that the author is someone who has studied the field and, in most cases, has made it his life’s work. The idea that Christianity is not for “intellectuals” needs to be stamped out, and I thank you for your part in this. Keep up the good work.

Roanoke, Va.

DAVID A. HOWELL

CHURCH PLANTER

Regarding Ralph Winter’s reference to the American Sunday-School Union (“Existing Churches; Ends or Means?,” Jan. 19), permit me to make a correction. We have not been “held at bay” by the denominations. While I think I understand how Winter arrived at his conclusion, it simply is not true. As a matter of fact, we have started more than 3,000 churches just since the turn of the century. This fact has not always been adequately publicized, which probably accounts for Winter’s not knowing this. We are an evangelistic/church-planting organization. The starting and maintaining of Sunday schools is merely one of our methods. (It is unusual and definitely misleading for an organization like ours to be named after only one of its methods.)

OLAN HENDRIX

General Director

American Sunday-School Union

Philadelphia, Pa.

NEW FUNDAMENTALISM

Reading E. F. Klug’s “The Evils of Orthodoxy” (Feb. 2) I react with mixed feelings. As a pastor, I often note the influence of non-Christian elements in the doctrinal understandings of my people. Certainly every disciple is subject to various stresses, many of which run counter to the person and teachings of Jesus.

I have trouble with this article as soon as the phrase “inerrant Bible” is used, because it is a loaded term. It is not clear what meaning is intended by Mr. Klug, but I do know what countless Christians mean by it, and therefore I react against it.… In my parish experience, I find no real trouble with those who have rejected orthodoxy, but rather with the new fundamentalists. I believe the distortion of the Gospel from that perspective is as damaging as from any other direction. People are reading The Late Great Planet Earth, which I have seen advertised in your magazine, and the sequel, Satan Is Alive and Well On Planet Earth. I am far more concerned with this lust for satanism and overindulgence in apocalypticism than in many other issues. There is a great need for a balanced view of the Gospel and of the whole Bible.… Klug’s article may be a useful corrective for views of Luther, but I fear he is adding fuel to the fire for the new fundamentalists. The article is too vague. Orthodoxy is nowhere defined in a specific manner so as to remove all doubt about the author’s intent. It is one of those articles that any person could pick up and quote to defend his chosen point of view.

DAVID H. WEIBLE

The United Methodist Church

Granger, Iowa

Thank you for the very fine article on “The ‘Evils’ of Orthodoxy.” It was a joy and a stimulation to read.

The Reverend OSCAR C. KLEMP

Portage, Wisc.

Thank you for printing the article by Professor Klug; it’s good to see the other side of the argument for a change. Still, I was hoping he would define what he meant by the “purity” of doctrine. Whose doctrine is pure? Lutheran? Reformed? Baptist? Pentecostal? Purity of doctrine is a matter of degree, and the struggle going on in our Missouri Synod (and in other denominations) is over the question of where you draw the line. Whom do you allow in your fellowship and communion? How much latitude of doctrine do you allow? Some in our Synod (such as the supporters of the tabloid Christian News) would make the criterion of fellowship the acceptance of the historicity of Adam and Eve, the unity of the book of Isaiah, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the historicity of Jonah, and so on; others say the criterion of fellowship is agreement with Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions; others say the criterion is Scripture, the Confessions, and Synodical resolutions; still others say it is all these matters (doctrine) as well as practice. How much purity do we want? For the past century we of Missouri have separated ourselves from other Lutherans because of differences in practice, even though there was agreement on doctrine. Now it’s too late to get together because doctrinal differences have crept in.

The Reverend JAMES A. HILL

Morden, Manitoba

POSITIVE-MINDED

Thank you for bringing Nancy M. Tischler’s very fine article “Onward, Christian Soldiers?” to us in the February 2 issue of your excellent magazine. Miss Tischler handles her theme in a forthright and most perceptive manner. We need to have more such positive-thinking journalism to challenge our minds away from the current trend to negative thinking in this country.

STARR WEST JONES

Senior Editor

International Editions

Guideposts

New York, N. Y.

FOR MORAL REGENERATION

I am writing in reference to the editorial “The President Asks For Our Prayers” (Feb. 16). It is my opinion that your criticism of the call of the President for “pride” in our nation is not justified. The Scriptures which you quote have little or no bearing on the “pride” which the President calls for. The pride which Mr. Nixon suggests would be good for our nation is not the pride which Jesus warns us against; it is the pride which Webster defines as “reasonable and justifiable self-respect.”

The Bible warns us to shun the pride which tries to usurp God’s position in our lives, the pride which would establish ourselves as the standard by which we would measure other people.

But Jesus calls us to a “pride” of self-love and self-respect. The command to love our neighbor as ourselves has within it the implication of this pride; without it we can have no real love for anyone else.

Mr. Nixon’s appeal for national pride should in no way be understood as an appeal for national self-glorification, as your editorial seems to imply. It should, rather, be seen as an appeal for the self-respect and self-love that is needed for the moral regeneration of our nation.

K. CLAIR MAC MILLAN

Immanuel United Church of Christ

Papineau, Ill.

STRAIGHTENING THE RECORD

In fairness to Dr. Larry Rohrman and First Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi, this word should be added to your news story on page 53 of the March 2 issue (“Outstanding”).

Two weeks after the groups were turned away when they came with television cameras and reporters, other blacks who came to worship were admitted to the church without incident. They reported on television that they were seated like any other worshipers and greatly enjoyed the services. Actually, blacks had attended services prior to this time. The Baptist Record, in one of its issues last November, carried a picture of a choir with two blacks in it singing in the church. Furthermore, according to reports, the national Jaycees apparently gave little or no consideration to Charles Evers’s request that the award to Rohrman as one of the nation’s “ten outstanding young men” be revoked.

JOE T. ODLE

Editor

The Baptist Record

Jackson, Miss.

NO TIME

I never cease to be amused and rather grieved to see the response of our organized church and theologians to reports of supernatural acts of God. Your article on the Indonesian revival reflects this dilemma (“Demythologizing Indonesia’s Revival,” March 2). We profess so much and pray such beautiful prayers, and yet, if God responded to our prayers on the spot, we would likely climb out the windows of our elaborate churches.

I’ve not even read Mel Tari’s celebrated book Like a Mighty Wind, but I have seen a two-gram-a-day heroin addict get up off his knees completely healed of his drug habit. I have seen a hom*osexual set free of his sickness as he is prayed over. As an Episcopal layman, I haven’t time to read accounts of God’s miracles in other areas of the world, because I spend too much time praising his Name for what I am seeing him do right in our local midst.

May I suggest that our Christian leaders get their minds off evaluating God’s work, join up with some turned-on young Christians who are getting about their Father’s work, and then have something positive to report on their own ministries.…

What difference does it really make as to the quality of wine which our Lord has created out of water, or why spend time accounting for the number of resurrections? Let’s sell out to Jesus, enlist the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and let God keep the books.

BOB BEARDEN

Director

Christian Farms, Inc.

Harker Heights, Tex.

ON ABSTINENCE

My attention has been drawn to a recent item entitled “Hanging in There” (News, Feb. 2) by our friend Glenn Everett. We appreciate the publicity but would like to correct and clarify some of the points made.

Our party was on the ballot in only four states due to the ever tightening restrictions on minor parties imposed by wet-party-controlled state legislatures. In the states of Alabama, Colorado, and Kansas, where we were on the ballot both in 1968 and 1972, our vote increased 103 per cent. Applying the same percentage for the four states to the national total, we would have received at least a third of a million votes if all fifty states had granted us ballot access. This would have been the highest presidential vote ever received by our party.

On a per-capita basis it is true that the members of the Free Methodist Church give us more support than any other religious group. This is because they are one of the few denominations which still strongly advocate total abstinence for the individual and prohibition for the nation. However, our members and leaders represent a wide variety of religious affiliations, nearly all coming from Bible-believing churches.

EARL F. DODGE

Executive Secretary

Prohibition National Committee

Denver, Colo.

WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK?

Your analysis carefully points to the faulty reasoning behind the evidence given for some aspects of the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling (“Abortion and the Court,” Feb. 16). However, just because a decision runs counter to the “moral sense of the American people” is not reason enough to change the decision if it is within the framework of the constitution that has let the American people develop a moral sense with more individual freedom than perhaps any other country in the world’s history.

BILL GARBER

Instructor in Journalism

Southern Missionary College

Collegedale, Tenn.

Pearl Buck

In the passing of Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, America has lost the greatest portrayer of China’s life as it was during the first part of this century. Her Good Earth was a masterpiece that deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize, and later books won for her the coveted Nobel Prize for literature. She was prolific (more than eighty-five books) and influential (the most translated of all American authors).

Daughter of a Presbyterian missionary, she seemed less than kind in the way she portrayed her father in the Fighting Angel and her mother in The Exile. Those who knew her parents felt that these books were caricatures of two godly people who worked hard and suffered much under the conditions missionaries were forced to face at the turn of the century and during the first two decades of this one.

Mrs. Buck herself returned to China as an educational missionary, but gave that up to become the wife of Dr. J. Lossing Buck, professor of agricultural missions at Nanking University. As time went on she divorced her husband, remarried, and became one of America’s best known and most prolific writers. Many thought her writings often reflected a distaste for the evangelical Christian faith and even a bias against Christian missions.

In later life, she gave much of her time and money to helping children of mixed blood, the results of misalliance between American soldiers and women in Korea, Japan, and other countries of the Far East. She was also deeply concerned for the welfare of handicapped children.

In the passing of time Mrs. Buck will probably be longest remembered for her first great novel, The Good Earth. Despite her love for China and her request to the Communist government to return for a visit, permission was never granted to her. She was eighty when she died.

Stealing Is Wrong

Sex is not the only area of biblical morality that is being increasingly violated in our time. Sexual transgressions are being matched by brazen violations of the eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.”

A publicity campaign against shoplifting is in high gear in many cities. But approximately three times as much merchandise is stolen from stores by employees as by “customers.” In addition, manufacturers and processors, since they don’t have shoplifting problems, know that their “shrinkage,” as it is euphemistically called, is attributable to employees. There is no way of knowing the value of stolen goods, but one authority guesses that it is at least $5 billion every year and maybe three times that much. The notion that such theft hurts only rich owners is ridiculous; all costs of doing business are passed on to the public.

What does all this have to do with Christians? Most

How To Help The Cause

Is CHRISTIANITY TODAY in your public or school library? Although we are already in thousands of libraries, there are thousands more in which we don’t appear but should—high school, junior and senior college, city, town, and county libraries. We have long been indexed in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, the standard guide, constantly updated. This means that library-users can readily look up what we have said on abortion, the Jesus movement, women’s liberation, and all sorts of other topics that we seek to address from a biblically informed perspective.

We have two other assets that can help us expand our circulation in libraries. First, the recently published second edition of the standard Magazines for Libraries, by Bill Katz, gives us a very favorable review (page 681). Librarians recognize the need to provide balanced fare, but many of them take this to mean having Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish journals. As our readers know, the differences within each of these traditions are often more substantial than the differences between them. Another Protestant magazine, much older than CHRISTIANITY TODAY and one with which we differ on many matters, is also in many more libraries (though its total circulation is much smaller than ours). If you find the Christian Century but not CHRISTIANITY TODAY in your library, you can point to the librarian’s own standard guidebook, which says CT “should be in any library which receives the Century.”

This leads to the other key asset we have for getting into more libraries: you. Librarians respond to suggestions from their users. If you will write to our Promotion Manager, he will send you a small packet, including a letter you can deliver for us. Notice carefully that we are not asking you to donate a subscription to a library. Librarians tend to group donated materials in a bunch after the Z’s along with an assortment of eccentric and irregularly appearing giveaways.

So will you help us, or rather, help the cause of getting the faith we try to present into the libraries? Let us know how many libraries you want to approach for us, and we’ll send you materials. of us either are employed in firms where internal theft goes on or are in contact—through friendship, ministry, and the like—with persons in such firms. The Christian must beware the temptation to justify becoming a thief himself because “everybody else is doing it” (perhaps even his own supervisor) or because his boss is not paying him fairly. The Christian must also beware the temptation to look the other way to pretend he doesn’t know what is going on so as to avoid unpopularity or trouble. Not “tattling” may be considered good ethics by the world, but in the sight of God to know of crime and not to report it to responsible authorities is surely sin.

God is able and willing to forgive sin, but only when the wrongdoer acknowledges his sin. So long as thieves get away with their crimes, they are not likely to recognize their need for salvation. The cause of the Gospel is advanced when Christians hold before the world the standards of righteousness and work within the framework of just laws to bring criminals to account.

No Corrupt Communication

Profanity and vulgarity have always been a part of the English language, but of late they are increasingly in evidence on the printed page and in the electronic media. It has often been remarked that a frequent resort to vulgar and profane language is a sign of a weak vocabulary and sloppy thinking. It probably signifies a widespread sense of alienation and frustration: the use of expressions that have no plausible relation to the subject discussed suggests resignation in the face of a situation that one can neither comprehend nor influence.

At the same time, there is a disintegrating effect in this that makes meaningful communication and rational discourse more difficult. In his essay On Liberation, Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher of the New Left, speaks of the massive use of obscene language as a form of social criticism, but he later warns that the progressive degeneration of language might eventually make real criticism impossible, because the connection between words and their meanings could become lost. Today one has the impression that many of the media have a kind of an infantile fascination with “realistic” language. There may indeed be some gain in realism, as a replay of what is actually said, and the shock effect may attract attention, but there is certainly a loss in clarity, precision, and meaning.

We should distinguish between language that is profane and language that is merely vulgar or obscene. Profane language shows irreverence or disrespect for what is sacred: God, his attributes, and things that pertain to him; vulgar language is “common,” and obscene language evokes sexual imagery. Profanity is never acceptable for Christians, and even unbelievers should be aware of the general warning, “The Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain” (Exod. 20:7). A consistent refusal to use the name of God and of Jesus Christ, and related words irreverently is a minimum standard of Christian testimony for all believers.

Vulgarity and obscenity, by contrast, might be considered a matter of taste. Certainly one can imagine situations in which the use of euphemisms or loan-words from the Latin to avoid “vulgar” expressions of Germanic origin seems unnecessarily pedantic. And yet the Christian should hold not merely absolute standards of obedience but also high relative standards of taste: thus Paul writes, “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may impart grace to those who hear” (Eph. 4:29). The deluge of “corrupt communication” (to use King James language), amplified by the media, seldom meets any of these criteria.

A Trespasser In The Temple Of Science?

A tempest has arisen at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton over the appointment of sociologist Robert Bellah to the permanent faculty. Opposition to Dr. Bellah is so great that several faculty members have called for the resignation of Dr. Carl Kaysen, institute director. The institute has schools of historical studies, mathematics, and natural sciences, and is beginning one for social sciences.

The reasons for the opposition are less than clear. Bellah is a sociologist specializing in religion. He reintroduced the concept of an American civil religion in a pioneering article in 1967. His basic work, however, is on Japanese religion. Apparently some institute members object to the presence of a sociologist, feeling that sociology does not belong among the sciences; some object to an institute member’s concentrating on religion; and some think Bellah is not a competent scholar.

Sociology involves many subjective observations and judgments, of course, but it is unusual to hear charges of mediocrity raised against a man who is honored by his colleagues in his own field. Are institute members afraid that even the sociology of religion might contaminate their scientific purity? Certainly such a vendetta is rare in the normally quiet groves of Academe.

Pow Faith

The return of American prisoners of war from Viet Nam has been an unusually heartening event. There has been nothing quite like it in this country’s history. Never before have we waited so long …

Already we are getting moving stories of how faith in God sustained many of the prisoners and kept them from losing their dignity as human beings. What a happy surprise to see these men return in relatively good physical and mental condition. Once they are all back we may be told a little more of the seamier side of life in Hanoi, but for the moment let us be content to be glad for what we know.

Many a prayer was uttered for the captives’ protection. We now need to express our gratitude to God in a meaningful way for the answer to these prayers.

The great world empire of Rome had thousands of provincial officials in the course of the half-millennium during which it ruled the Mediterranean world, but only one is remembered. Hundreds of millions of Christians around the world mention him whenever they confess their faith in the words of the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed, “crucified [or suffered] under Pontius Pilate.” Millions of children who have never heard the name of the great Tiberius, second emperor of Rome, know that of his petty underling Pilate. This otherwise undistinguished governor provides a crucial link in the chain binding the great cosmic drama of our redemption to the petty circ*mstances of this-worldly history in which our earthly lives run their course and ultimately are snuffed out.

The mention of Pilate, a man whose political influence and administrative incompetence did not escape the notice of secular historians of his time, reminds us that the Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ was not a mythic event taking place beyond space and time, a symbolic struggle between good and evil, but an “incident” in the troubled history of occupied Palestine.

It would be a grievous error to overlook the cosmic implications of the Good Friday event, in which the divine Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, shared our human fate to the extent of being judged guilty—falsely—by human courts and destroyed by human executioners. But it would be romantic or spiritualizing myopia not to recognize the commonplace and pathetic nature of the agonizing death of one more victim among tens of thousands to Roman “justice” and state necessity. In the manner of his life, Jesus shared the common lot of ordinary men, but in his death, he took upon himself, in exemplary fashion, a humiliation more extreme than the ordinary indecencies of our human condition: captured by a follower’s treachery, convicted by false witnesses and corrupt judges, and executed in another man’s place because of the fickleness of what had earlier been an admiring mob. And thus his death stands as a pattern for the deaths of so many other men: unjust, unnecessarily cruel.

In describing the redemptive work of Christ, the early theologian Ireneaus of Lyons speaks of his “recapitulation” of the human race: Jesus fulfilled his mission as the Second Adam by summing up, in his own experience, the common lot of Adam’s race, from birth through childhood, youth, and maturity, to cruel death. And though Jesus’ comparatively early death spared him the disintegrative deterioration to which those who live longer gradually fall prey, the lash and the cross first marred and then to all appearances destroyed the human dignity, beauty, and comeliness that he must have possessed. In this, then, too, he recapitulated human struggles, the losing battle with degenerative forces that each of us must face, whether we experience it too suddenly to realize, as in instantaneous death, in a short agony, as he did, or in a protracted decline, as is the more common fate today.

Furthermore—as many of us, though with far less reason, also are—he must have been tormented with an awareness that his sufferings were unjust, undeserved, and excessive. Human wisdom and all the ingenuity of theologians have not convincingly clarified the depth out of which he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is hard to conceive that the Only-Begotten of the Father, who is in the bosom of the Father, knowing his mission and his coming victory, could experience the full dereliction which that cry seems to bespeak. And yet Scripture bears eloquent testimony to the fact that he not merely appeared to suffer and be broken but did suffer and was broken, experiencing in some sense a more total isolation than is ever the lot of those whose passage through the gates of death is rendered easy and almost imperceptible with the aid of modern narcosis.

We cannot really think of Good Friday and the Passion in isolation, for we know of the glorious victory of the Resurrection which followed. But there may come a time when we seem to experience it so. There are, or likely will be, times in the life of every Christian when the promise of final vindication, however glorious and sure, seems far less real than the insistent present pressure of defeat and coming death. In such an hour, remember that for Him too the actual passage, whatever its cosmic import, was common, and vulgar, and humiliating—the very event forever tied to the name of the incompetent Pilate. We will all have to follow him through the door of death, unless he soon returns in glory—and for many of us that following will be difficult, humiliating, and banal. His Passion reminds us that he knows, more deeply than we can realize while enjoying health and tranquility, what that means.

Vivid among memories of my years of medical practice is the recollection of an emergency call to see the victim of a ghastly accident. One minute this man was the picture of health; two minutes later he was dead, drained of blood by a laceration of the aorta.

A massive hemorrhage always presents a problem of the first magnitude for a physician. If it is not stopped, death invariably ensues; as the Scriptures say, “the life is in the blood.”

From some, the mention of our Lord’s shed blood brings the retort that “this is a slaughterhouse religion, a concept of God that the modern mind cannot accept.” I have heard this remark, and it sends a chill down my spine. I am reminded of Hebrews 10:28: “He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses. Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy [ordinary] thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?”

It is not for man to question the blood atonement; what he is to do is humbly accept this mysterious evidence of God’s love.

What does the Bible have to say about blood in general, and about the shed blood of Christ in particular?

Genesis 9:4 and Leviticus 17:11, 14 state that the life is in the blood, and this connection between blood and life carries over into the spiritual realm. Without the redeeming blood of Christ, blood shed for the remission of sins, there can be no spiritual life. The minister who in his teaching and preaching denies or ignores the blood of Christ does so at deadly peril to all concerned.

We are familiar with the story of the delivery of the children of Israel from Egypt. Commanded to sprinkle blood on the door posts and lintels of their houses, they were comforted with these words: “When I see the blood, I will pass over you,” for “the blood shall be to you a token” (Exod. 12:13). The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says of Moses: “Through faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them” (Heb. 11:28).

That there is a symbolic or prophetic note in this incident is evident. Mankind stands in judgment before God, and in the midst of judgment God offers mercy and forgiveness. “When I see the blood, I will pass over you”—this reminds a sinful world that God poured out his judgment upon his Son on Calvary because he loves us so much. “One of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:34). To what purpose? That by faith the blood of the murdered Son of God might stand between us and the righteous judgment of a Holy God.

The blood of the Lamb of God fulfilled what the blood of bulls and goats could not, for the Old Covenant was superseded by the New. Jesus “took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matt. 26:27, 28).

Later the risen Lord revealed to the Apostle Paul the significance of this sacrament: “This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:25).

Writing to Jewish Christians, men and women deeply aware of sacrificial significance, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews shows the significance of the blood atonement of our Lord: “Into the second went the high priest alone once every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself, and for the errors of the people: the Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing.… But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Heb. 9:7, 8, 11, 12).

And then to crown this glorious truth the writer adds: “For if the blood of bulls and goats … sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (vs. 13, 14).

Placing the blood of Christ in perfect perspective the author concludes: “Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through Jesusp Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen” (Heb. 13:20, 21).

The Apostle Peter writes: “Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:2). Peter goes on: “Redeemed … with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot (vs. 18, 19).

John takes up the theme: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

In the Revelation the elders sing: “Thou art worthy … for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood” (5:9). The final victory is foretold in these words: “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto death” (12:11).

Mysterious though it may be, the blood of the Son of God, shed on Calvary, is the agent of man’s redemption—“whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood” (Rom. 3:25). “Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him” (Rom. 5:9). “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace” (Eph. 1:7).

Man may reject or discredit the blood of Christ but he does so to his own eternal undoing. Much as a bloodless religion may appeal to the esthetic sense, it is as dead as an exsanguinated corpse!

Thirty years ago in one American university, the study of psychology was confined to a single course taught in the philosophy department. Today a student who wants to pursue psychology at that university can choose from three curricular tracks: clinical, experimental, or educational psychology. Within each there are a host of sub-disciplines, such as learning theory, abnormal development, personality theory, animal psychology, physiological psychology, and social psychology. Similar patterns of “mushrooming,” specialization, and diversification can be seen in the development of other “social sciences,” such as political science and sociology.

The Word of God has much to say about human sociality: it teaches the nature of this sociality, and it provides directives for understanding and structuring the social dimension. As servants of that Word, evangelical Christians must attempt to discover and make known whatever perspectives the Scriptures offer on the “scientific” study of man.

Christians are not the only ones who insist the social sciences need a direction of some sort that they are not getting. Paul Goodman, for instance, has argued that we need a perspective on social problems that goes beyond that of the present-day social sciences, “which limit the discussion to the arrangement, communication, and culture-pattern of people as they currently appear.” Goodman himself pleads for the “indispensable advantage” offered by the perspectives of “history and poetry,” which can point us to “other possible ways of human being, which might have other arrangements, communications, and patterns” (Compulsory Mis-education and the Community of Scholars, p. 164). To this the Christian must add that historical analyses and poetic visions are themselves in need of the illumination provided by God’s address to men in Scripture.

What are some ingredients of a Christian perspective on the social sciences? Of basic importance, surely, is the matter stressed by John Calvin in the opening pages of his Institutes: that central to man’s social relations—indeed, to his very identity—is his relation to God, and that without clearly understanding his inescapable presence before God man cannot properly understand his relations with other created persons and institutions.

The failure to see the centrality of this relation is most obvious when non-Christian social scientists deal directly with religious beliefs and practices. Consider this description, by two sociologists, of the “Jesus people” phenomenon:

Instead of progressing toward adult ethics, the Jesus person clutches tenaciously to childhood morality, with its simplistic black-and-white, right-and-wrong judgments. Rather than developing behavior oriented toward reality, he flies into ideational, ideological abstractions to numb his awareness of his newly arisen needs [R. L. Adams and R. J. Fox, “Mainlining Jesus: The New Trip,” Society, February, 1972].

Many of us would have our own criticisms of the movement being described here, but that is beside the point. The important point is that some social scientists would apply these remarks to evangelicals in general. Of course, what one views as a “simplistic” morality has a lot to do with whether one accepts or rejects the moral directives presented in Scripture. Also, what one takes to be “behavior oriented toward reality” is intimately linked to whether, for example, one believes prayer is genuine communication with a living God. Accepting the God-man relation as central to human social existence has crucial implications for how one views such phenomena as the Jesus people.

This fundamental point is linked to other important ingredients in the Christian perspective on the social sciences. For one thing, it has a bearing on the question, What is the proper scope of the study of man? Christians must resist the simple reductionisms that characterize so much of twentieth-century social science: the behaviorism that restricts the study of man to overt behavior; the recent emphases on role-playing and “game” models that tend to reduce persons to social and institutional roles or at least to place undue stress on these roles; the suggestion, which pervades much current counseling and therapeutic methodology, that the free, uninhibited flow of feelings is the primary goal of human interaction; the apparent reduction of the purpose of social and political institutions to “conflict-management,” in which the role of the administrator (e.g., the government official, the pastor, the elementary teacher, sometimes even the parent) is seen largely as a matter of providing structured management of the continuing flow of conflicting interests, while taking these interests at face value (i.e., not evaluating them as proper or improper).

I do not mean to suggest, in these generalizations, that we ought not to study or cannot benefit from these various approaches. We have much to learn about, for example, the “games people play.” What we must not do is see people primarily in terms of these “games,” for Christians must view the study of man in the light of the biblical vision of man in his wholeness.

An important qualification must be placed on all of this. As the Christian studies the social aspect of human life, he must be aware that he is, in large part, studying man in his fallen state. This means, I think, that the reductionistic models and theories often used in the social sciences have at least this much legitimacy: the very people and groups being studied are engaged in a kind of “reductionistic” enterprise. Succumbing to the temptation of the Fall, “Ye shall be as gods,” men wrongly and rebelliously restrict—or vainly attempt to restrict—the scope of their being.

These remarks by a proponent of existentialism suggest a line of thought that can be given some Christian substance:

If a sociologist can successfully predict the proper time and place to market striped toothpaste, this is only because the choice of a dentifrice is a matter of little importance and most persons are quite willing to allow that choice to be made for them. Nonetheless, even here axiological considerations predominate over ontological considerations.… Specifically, this means that although freedom is inalienable, it is still possible for the individual to choose that his behavior be dictated by others, thus permitting himself to become a manipulable and predictable object for the social engineer. This kind of behavior is what the existentialists call “flight from freedom,” an attempt to make life easy which succeeds only in depriving life of existential intensity (Robert Olsen, An Introduction to Existentialism, p. 88).

The Christian must make an analogous point here. Mankind in its fallen state is involved in a “flight from wholeness,” a self-deceptive denial of the fullness of man’s created nature before the living God. While this denial cannot totally succeed, men can “reduce” themselves. Some persons virtually become manipulated sex-objects; others largely succeed in acting like unthinking automatons whose overt behavior is what they are. In this sense the distorted models and theories of human nature often implicit in the work of social scientists are fairly accurate reflections of the distorted condition of sinful human nature.

SING THE LORD, WISELY

And so I sing …

Owls in emerald,

Gray house cats, stretching,

Streams in their pebbled beds

Sleepily slurring,

Vixens on velvet feet

Swift through the meadow,

Mice in the corncrib

Too sly for shadow;

Stars on a scale of sky

Steadily holding

In orbit, and oceans

Faithful tides keeping.

Sing the Lord, wisely.…

Heart, do not worry,

You, too, are destined,

Cease your mad hurry.

You cannot alter

A summer, a spring,

Hold to this wisdom,

Sing the Lord, sing!

GLADYS McKEE

Two more extensive examples will help to illustrate the point. In Games People Play Eric Berne outlines the therapeutic techniques of “transactional analysis.” He suggests that the multiple, diverse patterns of human behavior are all associated with three fundamental “ego states,” those of the Parent, the Adult, and the Child, and that at any given moment a person’s behavior reflects one of these three states. About the diagram he presents to illustrate this theory he says: “This represents, from the present viewpoint, a diagram of the complete personality of any individual.”

The Christian might well wonder (ignoring here Thomas Harris’s application of Berne’s theory to religious questions in I’m OK—You’re OK, which may not be consistent with Berne’s intentions) how to conceive of the God-man relation in terms of this theory of the “complete personality of any individual.” The Bible teaches that man’s role as a creature before God, and presumably the “ego state” associated with that role, is distinct from all man’s “horizontal” creaturely relations. This seems to imply that however analogous the relation between, say, the parent and child might be to that between God and man, they are nonetheless different in important ways. Therefore, any attempt to understand man’s sense of his creatureliness, of his total dependence on his Maker, in terms of his relationship with other creatures would seem to be inadequate in the light of the biblical perspective.

On the other hand, the biblical account (cf. Romans 1:21) pictures unregenerate man as denying his relation to God. As Saint Augustine describes this denial in Of True Religion, sinful men thereby invest some creaturely relationship with a value, an intimacy, that rightly belongs to the God-man relationship. This is idolatry. And it may be that Berne’s model is an accurate description of the “ego state” options that are actually open to sinful persons, given the idolatrous, reductionistic enterprise in which they are engaged.

As another example, consider the “interest group” model often used by political scientists and sociologists. Social dynamics are interpreted in terms of conflict between groups that are organized along lines of specific selfish “interests.” For example, Howard R. Smith writes in Democracy and the Public Interest:

Those who insist on distinguishing between the common good and particular goods are in all probability themselves advancing some spurious common good—regardless of how sincere they are in their belief in the social value of what they are proposing, or how “right” in their analysis of social gains [p. 83].

This kind of thinking leads commentators to analyze the debate over liberalized abortion laws purely as a matter of a “power struggle” between the Roman Catholic Church and “politicized” women.

To interpret social and political advocacy as mere selfish manipulation is to deny man’s created capacity for dispassionate, theoretical reflection on morality and justice. But we must also recognize that men often do ascribe to their own quest for power a significance that virtually prevents them from judging their own strivings in the light of the public interest. So a group-interest model may accurately reflect much existing social interaction.

In the light of all this, what is the task of the Christian social scientist? It is, I suggest, twofold, and the Christian social scientist must feel the tension of this dual task. His use of current models and theories in the social sciences must be critical; he must recognize their potentially distortive implications. At the same time, his analyses of human relations and conditions must be carried on in the agonizing awareness of the actual distortions that characterize the fallen state. He must not be content, then, to carry on his work with a spirit of acceptance of present conditions; his work must reflect, and witness to, the richness and wholeness of God’s creative and redemptive purposes for men.

This is a difficult assignment. It means the Christian social scientist can neither withdraw from nor wholeheartedly accept the frameworks and methodologies of his secular colleagues. But the difficulty of the task is matched by its urgency. The American evangelical community would do well to seek ways of offering encouragement and prayerful support.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

In the first week of my pastorate in 1946, two ruling elders of the church took me to lunch on separate days. Both were admirals in the United States Navy.

The first was Admiral Paul A. Bastedo, who had been one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s naval aides. In the course of our lunch he said, “You have come to a historic pulpit with a succession of great preachers. Get a good staff; give your primary time to study, to preparation for Sunday services, especially to the sermon. Above all else, get out of Washington for an extended period each year to keep perspective, to renew your body, mind, and spirit. A man is qualified to preach in the capital only as he gets out of it from time to time. That is the way to keep fit for us, your parishioners.”

And Admiral Joel T. Boone said, “Edward, you have come to a famous pulpit in the nation’s capital. Washington is like a stage of a great theater with the bright lights illuminating political profiles. The actors come and go. The theater of government goes on. Don’t let that trouble you. Rather let it challenge you. Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to needy men as best you can, and the message will get home to the politicians and all the others at every level.”

So the text for my first Sunday was, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth …” (Rom. 1:6). The text for today is the same, and the theme of my life for all the days between has been the same, albeit interpreted in its many facets and overtones and implications: but always the good news of redeeming grace in Jesus Christ.

The author of our text had many things of which to be ashamed.

Paul was ashamed of his own past. In his earlier years he had given his brilliant mind and persuasive talents to the blasphemy and persecution of Christians. Every recollection must have given him a blush of shame and a twinge of regret.

Paul was ashamed of his own blood brethren, the men of Israel, when they persistently rejected Jesus Christ as Deliverer. He was deeply aware of his great religious heritage and therefore regretful when his own people failed to identify the Saviour whom he chose to follow. “Because of unbelief, they were broken off,” he cried with a sob.

Paul was ashamed of the wickedness, the depravity, the degeneration and progressive deterioration of Rome. He was a citizen of that proud empire, and the evil eating like a canker at its heart brought him humiliation. Said he, “God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves; who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Rom. 1:24, 25).

Paul was at times ashamed of his fellow Christians—their instability, their ready accommodations to Judaism, their cautious demeanor, and in some cases their outright abandonment of Christ.

Yes, there were many things of which the author of the Epistle to the Romans was ashamed. But you have read only the introduction to his message when you come upon the exultant testimony to the one thing of which he was never ashamed: “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.”

It was late in the afternoon of his glorious career. Paul had met Christ in his post-resurrection glory as “one born out of time.” He had tested the power of the Gospel of Christ in his own life. He had earned his credentials in labor and suffering. He knew his day, its strength and its weakness. He was aware of the might of Rome, the wisdom of the Greeks, the religious heritage of the Jews. Having uttered the Gospel, interpreted its meaning, and carried it to the Mediterranean world, he longed to go to that city, which was the capital not only of a proud empire but of the civilized world.

What could one write from an obscure province to a tiny band of Christians in a city swollen with imperial pride? If Rome was unashamed, so was Paul. Away with easy evasions; away with cowardly silences; away with secular compromises! “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,” he wrote. He was uninhibited, unintimidated, unashamed anywhere before any man. For this gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to every one who has faith” (RSV).

I

The “good tidings” Paul had for that ancient world was the news that God had entered man’s life by Jesus Christ and that through faith in Christ’s finished work, man could be redeemed, his whole life lifted to the higher order of the Kingdom of God.

Paul was unashamed of the person of Jesus Christ. Other religious and social movements make much of principles and ideas. Christianity has principles and ideas, but that isn’t what it is. It is a person. Not an abstraction, not a ritual, not an ethical system, not an ideal (though it has all these), but rather a person, the person of Jesus Christ.

Paul was certain of the identity of Christ. Therefore he was unashamed of the person at the center of his father. The spirit at the center of the universe, the God who had created the cosmos, the God who had created man, the God who had established the moral order—that God came in Jesus Christ. “The word became flesh and dwelt among us … and we beheld his glory” (John 1:14). For Paul, everything centered in the person of Jesus Christ.

I am not ashamed of Jesus Christ. I am not ashamed of the lowly yet stupendous way he entered our world and became forever identified with our poor, lost, struggling humanity. I am not ashamed of the life he lived for thirty-three years. To do the will of his Father was his chief concern. To set the Kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdom of man was his dominating motive. To exalt labor and service to God and man as the supreme glory so that a towel and a hammer are as much badges of royalty as a scepter. In him, life was reformed—but He was more than a reformer. He was the Revealer of God. What a life! I am not ashamed of Christ. When catechisms and creeds are unconvincing, when theologies and philosophies are unpersuasive, and when our halting, limping speech is insufficient, somehow Jesus Christ the person gets hold of life.

Paul was not ashamed of the death Christ died, nor the cross that his dying turned into a symbol of triumph. He died in a love that nothing could break or exhaust, forgiving men their heinous deed, gathering up their concentrated evil, and loving them to the very end. He died in a holiness that nothing tarnished or minimized. He died in a victory over the world and sin—victory sealed and heralded by his resurrection; victory in which each of us may share as we, in faith, bring our broken, tattered, defeated lives and surrender them into his nail-pierced hands.

To the church in Galatia, Paul wrote: “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20).

What a Gospel! God came to men to rescue them from themselves, from one another, and from sin and from hell. Unashamed! So Paul spoke. When Jesus arose from the dead, a new era began. Emancipation for the life and spirit had come—freedom from sin, freedom from evil spirits, freedom from the law’s domination. To that little group in the capital of an ancient empire, boasting its ribboned roads, its lustrous law, its mighty army, its robust rulers, Paul said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.” On this truth I have staked down my testimony in the capital city of an even more glorious nation—“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.” What a Gospel! God in the midst of man’s life forever, forgiving, bringing new life and immeasurable power.

Ii

For, as Paul put it, “the gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” The term throughout the New Testament is dynamos—the mighty miracle of God’s omnipotence. We think we have power that makes Rome a pigmy: motor power, water power, electric power, industrial power, military power, atomic power; and if it remains committed to man’s own purposes it will do for us precisely what it did for Rome: destroy us. But the Gospel is God’s power to save. It is his power unto salvation.

1. Christ is God’s power to men’s minds. The sages and philosophers speculated about truth. In Christ, truth stood in the midst of time, personified. He is forever the point of reference, the standards for all ages. Let knowledge lead you where it will, let science explore the secrets of the universe, let the spirit of free inquiry have its way. When the little mind of man gets his intimations of reality, he discovers Christ was there from the beginning. Heaven and earth shall pass away; his truth abideth still. Every word he uttered, every parable he taught, was an intellectual resurrection. You cannot argue with Jesus Christ. You can only confront him, accept or reject him. To take him by faith is to find the truth that sets men free. Christ is the power to men’s minds.

2. Christ is the power of God to man’s moral nature. The fact that man is a sinner ought to be quite evident in our age. Greed and lust, pride and power, pillage and warfare reveal demonic facts. The difficulties of our age are not with gadgets and machines but with man as man. The trouble with man is that he is man—and man is a sinner. The fact of sin is not to be argued; it is self-evident. One sin adheres to another. Sin sears the memory, blinds us to moral values, makes the will impotent, infects the race with a persistent perverseness. “Wickedness,” as Dr. George Buttrick once put it, “is the mark both of our doom and our divinity. We are wicked; that is our doom. But we are aware of God, and so know our wickedness; that is our divinity.” Here is the division in our nature which we ourselves cannot heal. We are made in God’s image, but sin has distorted the image and modified the original creation. We cannot by ourselves save ourselves.

There was no other good enough

To pay the price of sin

He only could unlock the gate

Of Heaven and let us in.

Our agony today is that we have let Christ get hold of us a bit—enough to be judged by him, but not yet fully yielded to him.

3. The gospel of Christ is the power of God to our social order. Sin is not only personal and individual; it is social and universal. We belong to the race of men and cannot extricate ourselves from it. “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” We belong to one another. We share in one another’s virtues and vices, participate in one another’s amenities and penalties. We are redeemed in a vacuum but in human society.

There is only one Gospel. That Gospel is both vertical and horizontal. We are redeemed to a right relation with God, which issues in a right relation to man. We are saved to love God with our whole heart and mind and strength, and to love our neighbor—and our neighbor is every man. Salvation is not personal rescue only. Nor is it only a reordered society, especially if that order is apart from God. The one Gospel is a synthesis, both of personal life and of the social order.

We know the fiendishness and savagery of sin in human society. In slave-labor depots and concentration camps, on a hundred battlefields, in areas of prejudice and injustice to persons, our generation has seen the stark fact of sin in human society.

There is an answer to it all. “All we like sheep have gone astray … and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” God in time invaded life on our level, in the sacrifice of his Son for our redemption. We need not be ashamed of his Gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation, for everyone, everywhere.

This has been the underlying theme of this pulpit and parish life since it was preached on my first Sunday late in 1946. There is much talk about the prophetic role of the Church and the witness of the Church in judgment to particular social situations. Ministers may become as expert in politics, economics, and social work as any other persons. But there are other specialists, many of whom are Christian, to give their energies to these tasks. The Church lives by word and sacrament. If clergymen neglect their unique work, it will not be done.

The Church has a prophetic role, but it is seldom done well by collectivities—even by presbyteries, conferences, or general assemblies. I have helped compose resolutions and declarations that were the best we could do at the time; their value was limited. Sometimes one feels that the Church today tries to speak on so many subjects that the ears of the world are deaf to the primary message of God and truth and revelation. People get awfully fed up with tyro politicians and amateur sociologists and pseudo-psychiatrists in the pulpit. I am confident that after working all week in government—on budgets and programs, on economic and foreign policy, on welfare and defense requirements—those who come to the house of God on Sunday in Washington want to hear some word about God, the Bible, the disciplines of the Christian life—the ancient assertion, “Thus saith the Lord.…”

For the most part the great prophets were outside organized religion. They got their clues to truth neither from a convention nor from a priestly establishment. Speaking for God, they uttered what they believed in the depths of their being God had given them for the world. Only prophets can be truly prophetic.

So for these years I have endeavored to be a faithful herald of the Gospel with all its overtones and implications. Sometimes I have been in agreement with other churchmen, sometimes in disagreement (more often not with their intentions and objectives but with their tactics and lack of statesmanship).

Mr. Truman was President when I came. VE Day and VJ Day were past. The first atomic weapon had been employed to end a world war. The Marshall Plan was set in operation. Military forces were being demobilized. The world was being divided into two counter-forces, and the nations were making their alignments. The cold war began.

In the Church a new energy was beginning to stir. Veterans filled the theological schools. With their wartime conditioning, their moral earnestness, depth of commitment, and personal discipline, they provided the most promising clergymen to appear in all American history before or since. They served the new churches in the next decade.

In 1947 the final steps were completed for the establishment of the National Presbyterian Church on the foundation of the First Presbyterian Church in the District of Columbia and the Church of the Covenant. On October 19, 1947, President Truman unveiled the plaque at the door of the old church, made a moving speech, and joined representatives of major denominations from across the world in a service addressed by the moderator, Mr. Wilbur La Roe, and the stated clerk of the General Assembly, Dr. William Barrow Pugh. When the next Congress convened, President Truman led the leaders of our government in attending the first annual service of Intercession and Holy Communion. Later he worshiped with us from time to time and gathered some of my sermons to rest among his papers at Independence.

The religious boom of the 1950s was in incipient stages when President Eisenhower was inaugurated. On the morning of January 20, 1953, I conducted a preinaugural service for him and his official family. From it he went to his quarters and wrote a prayer of his own with which he began his address. It electrified the world and revealed a dimension in the new President previously less exposed. Ten days later he was baptized, and he and his wife became members of this church—the first time in history such an event took place after inauguration and, according to Catholic historians, the first time since Emperor Clovis I in A.D. 496 a chief of state was baptized after taking office. Thereafter the President and the First Lady were intimately and deeply a part of the life of this church. Cabinet meetings opened with prayer. Early that year, encouraged by Senator Frank Carlson and his pastor, President Eisenhower attended the first Presidential Prayer Breakfast, now an annual event attended by thousands and repeated in hundreds of government centers throughout the world.

Everywhere new churches were appearing, religious books and magazine articles had wide acceptance and large sales, church membership expanded. There was new evangelistic zeal and missionary outreach—the greatest religious activity in American history. Soon the President by his spiritual sensitiveness, his manly life of prayer, his uninhibited Christian testimony, became a symbol of America’s spiritual awakening following the great war. My book America’s Spiritual Recovery, dedicated to Dwight D. Eisenhower, with an introduction by J. Edgar Hoover, became a religious best-seller and the first selection of the Evangelical Book Club.

The awakening was far deeper and more real than some churchmen were able to understand. And for the first time in American history, a revival of religion came when there was neither a war nor an economic depression.

In the 1960s the loyalty and power gained in the previous decade were put to the test. The human resources of the churches, officially and unofficially, were to be creatively applied to help bring racial justice. The ways of reason and persuasion were set aside by some who resorted to parades, protests, and demonstrations. Liberals expected to accomplish too much; the conservatives resented and rejected the methods.

By the late 1960s churches, along with educational institutions and government, were regarded as power structures and became the subjects of group rage. Minority power groups arose; non-violent and violent elements appeared opposed to organized religion. But the residual power and the faithful remnant were still in the churches.

By the beginning of the 1970s there was plenty of religion in the air—as well as apathy by some and abandonment of the churches by others. People somehow became fascinated with the occult, Eastern and African religions, magic, mysticism, metaphysics, astrology, communalism. At length came the Jesus people, the Pentecostals, the new apocalyptic hope, the charismatic movements with people speaking in incoherent and unintelligible “tongues.” The decline in church membership that began in the 1960s continues in the 1970s, except in some smaller evangelical groups. Ecumenical activity, which engaged the energies of church leaders in the previous decade, is diminishing in the 70s. Councils of churches and plans of union get less attention. But the liberating influence of Pope John XXIII is still at work.

Now comes 1973 and the Key 73 programs—a North American movement that got its name from a meeting in this city near Key Bridge. The vision is that every unchurched family in North America will be visited by someone who comes with loving concern to share his faith in Christ.

There is nothing wrong with institutions. The Gospel has pervaded the whole world through the institutional church. And eventually all the new movements today either will come under the canopy of the existing churches or will themselves become institutionalized. So it was in the New Testament times; so it is now.

The signs of hope and promise are many. Fresh power and new insights are upon us. Then welcome all that is holy and wise. Cherish all that is holiest and healthiest in our heritage. Now and evermore we are to be unashamed of the Gospel of Christ—the power of God unto salvation for everyone.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

When the theme for the eighth ecumenical World Mission Conference—“Salvation Today”—was announced shortly after the Uppsala Assembly in 1968, many evangelicals rejoiced. With growing concern they had observed the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) losing sight of Christ’s Great Commission, of the eternal redemption of the unsaved “two billion” who by their sin, superstition, and ignorance are separated from God, the fountain of life. The announced theme seemed to offer the opportunity for clearly reaffirming the biblical foundation, content, and aim of Christian missions. Of course, it would not be an easy task, in view of the strong ideological cross-currents in official ecumenical quarters. But still the opportunity was too great to ignore.

Soon study groups were established, consultations were held, and theologians got down to serious work. Nobody has seen yet a complete catalogue of the documents produced in this process and subsequently submitted to Dr. Thomas Wieser, the full-time study secretary for coordinating these efforts. Their number must be great, for the conference had to be postponed several times, from the dates originally scheduled in 1969/70 to 1972/73. Although communication among the different groups was deplorably lacking, there is evidence that despite vast contrasts in the theological quality of this material, some excellent papers were produced. I am thinking particularly of the document of the Norwegian study group, which was based on a masterly survey by the Oslo New Testament scholar Edvin Larsson.

The pity was that these exegetical fruits were not made available to the Bangkok delegates in time, nor was there any synopsis of agreements and disagreements that could have stimulated further research. Some very good Bible studies that were distributed among the delegates came too late to be useful for the conference deliberations. In our chartered flight from Geneva to Bangkok, I saw the more conscientious participants making a last-minute effort to go through these yellow papers they had received just before departure. The spokesman of the twelve-man Roman Catholic delegation, Father Hamer from Rome, publicly regretted that better use had not been made of this valuable theological study material.

It would be wrong to assume that the failure in the theological preparation for Bangkok was due simply to organizational shortcomings. The six exegetical studies, for example, had already been delivered at a biblical consultation in Bossey in March, 1972. But this event passed virtually unnoticed. The only fruit of this consultation made available to the constituency—and that not until September—was a little brochure, “Biblical Perspectives on Salvation.” It was used a bit in the Bible-study groups in Bangkok but found to be hopelessly inadequate, at least by the group in which I participated, which was under the chairmanship of Greek Orthodox bishop Anastasios Yanoulatos.

The real reason for the breakdown of the exegetical preparation for Bangkok was twofold. First, it once more revealed the depth of the hermeneutical crisis in the WCC. There is no common conviction that the Bible is the authoritative and reliable basis for Christian faith and ministry. Scripture is seen by many as a collection of different historical documents, testifying to the experiences of salvation and understandings of the divine will at the time they were written. These witnesses do not necessarily agree among themselves, it is said, and they must be complemented by our own experiences in various areas of the human struggle today.

Second, these present-day experiences and quests now concern the ecumenical mind to so high a degree that even the witness of the Bible (when it is still consulted) is understood within the framework of current political, social, cultural, religious, or psychological problems. To this criticism, made in a study document from the Ecumenical Seminar in Tübingen, Wieser replied in Bangkok:

The insistence on the uniqueness of the story in the Bible in the interest of affirming its authority, however, serves to accentuate the discontinuity between the biblical story and our historical situation today. Does this mean that the authority can only be affirmed when it is one step “removed” from our experience?

The evangelical answer to this question would, of course, be a clear yes. The Bible can exercise its role as the sovereign norm for evaluating our experiences only if these experiences are put to the test rather than becoming part of the norm themselves! Otherwise contemporary man in his experiences and evaluations becomes the judge of the Word of God. Yea, he might even become the judge of God himself, as German “death-of-God theologian” Dorothée Sölle did, writing in one of the preparatory papers: “That God does not weep in the Scriptures speaks badly for him. He would have good reason to do so.” Here, and in several other conference texts, the borderline between theology and blasphemy has definitely been crossed.

Scripture, therefore, was not allowed to play its majestic role in Bangkok. It was complemented, or rather replaced, by a situationist approach, called in the modern ecumenical jargon “contextuality.” The real preparatory document for Bangkok, to which high importance was attributed by the organizers from Secretary General Philip Potter downward, was a collection of documents called “Salvation Today and Contemporary Experience.” It culminated in an episode (taken from the Japanese novel Silence) in which apostasy from the Christian faith was held to be the most relevant form of “salvation today” in the particular situation described. (This was reaffirmed by Indian Jesuit Samuel Rayan in the first issue of the conference newspaper Salvation Today, December 31, 1972.)

There was still another reason given by the Geneva staff as to why the conference deviated from the traditional procedure of working on the basis of theological documents prepared beforehand. This old method, it was said, would yield too much to the Western way of theologizing. Westerners reason on the basis of a scholastic system of dogmatic categories in order to arrive at highly abstract formulas. This was said to be both uncongenial to the minds of Christians in the third world and irrelevant to their problems. Therefore, the staff asserted, it was better to provide the conference with material that would be a more spontaneous expression of the Afro-Asian mind. Personal testimonies, poems, songs, pieces of drama, or liturgies would be more appropriate. Even a dancing group was planned through which some members could “explore the meaning of salvation.”

When the German delegation requested some solid theological documents to use in preparing for the conference, Gerhard Hoffmann, a newly appointed WCC staff member, replied:

The group leaders are not tied to definite texts. They can come with their own preparation, but they must face the insights of others who find other texts or interpretations more important. For the other groups, too, something analogous applies. Preparation is not possible on a mere intellectual level, but rather by being tuned in to the theme. This does not exclude an intellectual German theological discussion, but it reduces the possibility to a “contribution.” As you state, the German delegation is crying for “preparatory material.” The first answer, therefore, would be: Do not close yourselves to an experiment in group dynamics, and still less to the moving of God’s Spirit. Rather prepare yourselves in a different way this time! Is it not “preparation” if somebody somewhere discovers a new song, meditates on it, and takes it along to Bangkok? Of course, he also may bring along biblical texts which have just become important for him.

This reply from Geneva served as an eye-opener to me as to the real character of this conference. Although it was convened under a highly theological heading, serious theology was to be excluded from the very beginning. We rather were invited to expose ourselves to an experiment in group dynamics, which in America is more commonly known as “sensitivity training.” Formerly, at the time of its crude origins in China, it was called “brain-washing.” That this was done in the name of the working of God’s Spirit again bordered on blasphemy.

Furthermore, the fact that it was done under the pretext that this was more congenial to the mind of delegates from the third world was an insult to their churches. Up to now Afro-Asian church leaders have given ample proof that they are quite capable of making their contribution to sound biblical theology. Or is the late ecumenical theologian D. T. Niles already forgotten and disclaimed by the WCC, in which he played such an important part?

In any case, Geneva had decided to stage this experiment in group dynamics, and the organizers were determined to carry it through. They seemed to be convinced that this would be the way to let the conference delegates arrive at the organizers’ predetermined concept of “Salvation Today” without becoming aware that they were being manipulated by the shrewdest of psychological techniques.

The organizers of the Bangkok conference knew that if they allowed an open theological debate to develop, the results could prove highly unsatisfactory. A debacle quite similar to the polarization between ecumenicals and evangelicals at Uppsala in 1968 would have taken place. This would have meant that very few recommendations would have been passed. And these recommendations were the central aim of the whole conference. They had been designed to build up the ecumenical action program in which the WCC “Program Unit on Faith and Witness” has been busily engaged ever since the time of the integration of the International Missionary Council into the WCC in 1961.

Therefore, from the theological point of view, Bangkok was a frustrating experience. On the surface, boredom seemed to be a general condition. The conference program, which was not disclosed before the start of the meeting, provided very few public lectures and still less opportunity to discuss the advertised theme. In fact, only the Geneva establishment itself was heard from the pulpit. M. M. Thomas, chairman of the Central Committee, gave the one really theological address, “The Meaning of Salvation.” His address was followed by two reports, one by Potter as the previous director of CWME, and the other by Wieser on the proceedings of the “Salvation Today” studies.

The first week was composed of Bible studies under the general theme “Exploring the Meaning of Salvation.” The subsequent eight meetings of subsections and sections continued the conference work “with a view to action.” Here lay the real emphasis. Our objections would have been modified if the Bible studies—i.e., the two Bible presentations of Hans-Reudi Weber in the plenary as well as the three discussions in seven smaller Bible-study groups—had really been allowed to lay the theological foundations for an ecumenical action program for mission. But Weber’s Bible presentations took the form of a panel performing a drama that culminated in catechizing the audience. This turned the whole thing into “a nice Sunday-school lesson,” as Bishop Chandu Ray remarked.

Some of the Bible-study groups were bright spots on the program. But when I inquired at the opening of our group meeting whether there was a chance to bring our results to bear on the findings of the whole conference, the answer from WCC representatives was that the groups were not supposed to produce any statements; the Bible studies were arranged mainly for our own spiritual benefit. In the context of the group dynamic experiment, they seemed in fact to serve as preliminary stages in which, with the aid of our ecumenical sensitizers, we were gradually geared into the collective mind of the conference. Two of them did, indeed, produce quite evangelical statements, published on the bulletin board and in the conference paper. But only one of these became part of the final conference report. Here it rather serves as a biblical figleaf to cover the humanist nakedness.

The main task of working out the final recommendations was, at least nominally, assigned to the ten subsections into which the three main sections were divided. But even they were not able to produce theologically responsible statements. This was partly due to the deliberately disconcerted way of discussion, which could not lead to a real consensus. In subsection I-B on “Cultural Identity and Conversion,” for example, even in the sixth meeting the participants were not able to agree whether there was something unique in Christian conversion as over against conversion in Maoism or in other religions. Therefore the chairman had to write the report! This predicament can in part be accounted for by the fact that the themes of the subsections were not introduced by biblically oriented lectures or prepared drafts. Instead, “action reports” were given, to which the participants were to respond by telling their own “experiences.”

The “theology” of Bangkok, therefore, could be called the theology of experience. Even here not all experiences were accepted as equally valuable. When a young evangelical from West Africa movingly related his conversion from Islam to Christ, his story was bypassed without any further comment or evaluation. But much ado was made about the story of a Chinese intellectual whom the cultural revolution assigned to work in a pig stable, and who thereby discovered his need to be “converted” and to accept simple farm workers as his real fellow human beings. The theology, in this case, was that true conversion is not so much a religious experience as an overcoming of social estrangement.

Maoism was presented several times as an acceptable alternative to Christianity. This became evident when on the China evening the stress was not upon how the Gospel could be reintroduced to China but upon what the cultural revolution in China meant to our understanding of Salvation Today. The most drastic expression of the high evaluation of Maoism at the expense of Christianity was found on an anonymous poster that appeared the following morning on one of the bulletin boards. It read: “At China evening did you notice the compulsive neuroses of the West to ‘convert’ China? Salvation=God save China from ‘conversion’!”

This revealed, once again, not only the tremendous abyss between evangelical and ecumenical mission theology, but also the unwillingness of the controlling ecumenical organizers to allow a systematic analysis of this theological conflict and an open encounter. Some of us had foreseen this strategy at the beginning of the conference. Therefore Dr. Arthur Glasser and I seized the opportunity of the only public hearing after the three addresses of the WCC officials. We deplored the fact that the really crucial issue in connection with the conference theme, the ecumenical-conservative controversy on the theology of mission, which had so clearly been pinpointed by the Frankfurt Declaration, had not even been mentioned in the CWME report, “From Mexico City to Bangkok.”

We were both harshly met first by U Kyaw Than, general secretary of the East Asian Conference of Churches, and then by Philip Potter. Both employed rhetoric to reduce the general conflict reflected in the Frankfurt Declaration to an internal quarrel among West German theologians, which they would not allow to embarrass the World Conference or, as U Kyaw Than mocked, to infect Asia by theological tuberculosis.

my prayer

EMILE CAILLIET

Jehovah, Thou living Lord of the Covenant, ETERNAL Lord of LIFE in whom a Pilgrim of good will beginning from within doeth authentic Truth, grant me to ascertain ever more clearly thy guidance, as evidenced through the long-range pattern of days gone by. Enable me in thy grace to ABIDE at the very core of my being where my Christian redeemed life springs out of thee, and the secret of my identity remains hidden in thy merciful love. Grant that I may trust in thee alone, and be careful for NOTHING, as no man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature. O thou Lord of the Hill, vouchsafe that I may thus live in the constant awareness of thy might within me in the setting of the Delectable Country, even as the Hobgoblins, Satyrs, and Dragons of the Pit would frighten me.

God of our Lord JESUS CHRIST, preserve me from a false humility of inferiority feeling before men, and grant that my humility be that of Jesus, the humility of a Son, humility before thee. Almighty God in whom I live, and move, and have my being, may I shun meddling, aggressiveness, and all forms of antagonism, and absorb what happens to me—accepting it as a contribution to the long view I take of my life under thee. Grant that I may deepen rather than fret, in the realization that all the good I may do or say is but thy utterance through my infirmity.

Vouchsafe that I never indulge at the close of action in any vain brooding, whether of self-congratulation or self-despair, but merely forget the things that are behind the moment they have come to pass, LEAVING them with thee to overrule or to bless. And so bear me on as I learn to sing in the darkness of this world the song of thy redeeming love—until on thy kind arms I fall.

In the name of our Lord JESUS CHRIST, Amen.

Having evoked these sentiments, Potter succeeded in capturing enough emotional support from third-world participants to extinguish the threatening fire of a general theological debate in the plenary. My proposal to the conference to call for an international theological consultation between ecumenical and non-conciliar evangelical theologians to resolve the “fundamental crisis in Christian missions” was never entertained. Nor was it taken to the vote, when I made it a formal motion on the last day of the conference.

Does this mean that Bangkok was really an atheological meeting? Several German participants stated that the Afro-Asian delegates, who formed the majority, had finally refused any further intrusion of Western theology into their churches. The call for a moratorium in sending Western missionaries to the third-world churches was interpreted accordingly. “Asia has finally been granted the right to be saved according to its own fashion,” one radio commentator remarked.

African participants in particular repeatedly stated their desire “to find their true identity,” as the new slogan put it. This altogether unbiblical concept seems mainly to imply a reformulation of Christianity within the framework of the cultural and religious heritage of the African past. The Kimbanguist Church, which claims to have received a special revelation and blessing of the Holy Spirit through the prophet Simon Kimbangu (in the minds of his followers he has been almost uplifted to the fellowship within the divine Trinity), was therefore highly acclaimed. It was represented as the outstanding example of an indigenous African church that, without the cooperation of Western missionaries, had expanded rapidly and found its true identity.

I doubt whether Bangkok really has meant the breakthrough of the third-world churches from the former Western dominance towards a theology that is both truly indigenous and authentically Christian. I also doubt that the loudest Afro-Asian speakers at the Bangkok meeting were really representing the faith of the masses of Afro-Asian church members. They have so often enjoyed the privileges of VIPs at ecumenical meetings around the world that I suspect they have lost all vital contact with their fellow Christians at the grass-roots level. The influence of ecumenical sensitivity training with all its humanistic and syncretistic vocabulary has become ever greater. Thus mentally and ideologically they have become even more dependent on the West than they were under the influnce of so-called Western scholastic theology, which in most cases simply was plain biblical theology.

The deliberate appeal of WCC officials to African and Asian sentiments within the context of resurgent traditional religions has ushered in a dialectical process. It might finally aim at the formation of an inter-religious, semi-political world church. Still, all this is no spontaneous movement of the church in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Nor was the concept of “Salvation Today” that finally appeared in the official reports of the three sections—(I) “Culture and Identity,” (II) “Salvation and Social Justice,” and (III) “Churches Renewed in Mission”—the spontaneous theological self-expression of those members appointed by their churches and mission bodies.

To arrive at a proper theological evaluation of the Bangkok Conference it is necessary to distinguish two different overlapping conferences. The first had started long before the opening of the Bangkok meeting. It was the continuous consultation between the Geneva staff members and their card-carrying ecumenical henchmen in other parts of the world. This conference worked out both the theology for “Salvation Today” and the strategy for Bangkok. The second, more representative conference was the one in which the official delegates participated, carefully guided and guarded at every step by highly disciplined ecclesiocrats, who served as chairmen, secretaries, reflectors, consultants, artists, musicians, newspaper editors, or anonymous “sensitizers” in the group meetings. The purpose of this official meeting, I’m afraid, was to produce the predetermined results with the illusion that the participants had worked them out by themselves.

This master plan succeeded in part, but in part it got stuck because of the still intact biblical convictions of a great number of the delegates from many different countries and church traditions. This accounts for the rather streaky appearance of the section reports. These are clearly evangelical affirmations side by side with obtrusive expressions of current ecumenical ideology. Compare, for example, the following definitions of salvation and of mission in Section Report III-B:

Salvation is Jesus Christ’s liberation of individuals from sin and all its consequences. It is also a task which Jesus Christ accomplishes through his church to free the world from all forms of oppression. This can only happen if the church is renewed and grows.

It is our mission

—to call men to God’s Salvation in Jesus Christ,

—to help them to grow in faith and in their knowledge of Christ in whom God reveals and restores to us our true humanity, our identity as men and women created in his image,

—to invite them to let themselves be constantly re-created in this image, in an eschatological community which is committed to man’s struggle for liberation, unity, justice, peace and fullness of life.

One of the worst statements is found in the “Litany” produced by Section I, which contains the following strange combination of modern beatitudes:

You were a poor Mexican baptized by the Holy Spirit and the Blood of the Lamb:

I rejoice with you, my brother.

You were an intellectual Chinese who broke through the barrier between yourself and the dung-smelling peasant:

I rejoice with you, my sister.

You found all the traditional language meaningless and became “an atheist by the grace of God”:

I rejoice with you, my brother.

Out of the depths of your despair and bondage you cried and in your cry was poignant hope:

I rejoice with you, my sister.

You were oppressed and fled to the liberated areas and dedicated your life to revolutionary struggle:

I rejoice with you, my brother.

You were oppressed and put down by male authority and in spite of sneers and snarls persevered in your quest for dignity:

I rejoice with you, my sister.

It would be futile to weigh the pros against the cons and from such analysis proceed to a diagnosis of how far the WCC at its Bangkok meeting strayed from biblical truth and how much hope there may be for further dialogue, cooperation, and clarification between the ecumenical and the evangelical movement. The “Program Unit on Faith and Witness” will not feel bound by any theological affirmations that do not clearly support its present strategy.

It is far more important to notice which emphases were put into the reports and recommendations, either by the continuous influence of ecumenical activists or by their last-minute interferences. These really indicate the line of action that the WCC will follow during the forthcoming period of unchallenged executive power. “Now we are in business,” one Geneva staff-officer remarked when those theologically concerned participants who would not be delegates at the next assembly had left Bangkok. The emphases on “dialogue with men of living faiths,” on “salvation through political confrontation,” and on a “moratorium” for Western missions are the decisive results of Bangkok. Only the third of these is really new. One might term it an effort at the self-liquidation of the Western missionary movement.

As for the theological understanding of the theme “Salvation Today,” the preamble prepared by Jürgen Moltmann for one section report is the most important one. It tries to bridge the gap between the evangelical concept of a predominantly personal and eschatological salvation and the ecumenical concept with its social, this-worldly emphasis by means of a “comprehensive notion of salvation.” But Moltmann was challenged on three main points. First, he failed to acknowledge the basic distinction between the primary restoration of fallen man to the love of God and the social reconciliation that is its consequence. Second, his concept of anticipated eschatology makes man here and now the acting participant in the final salvation of the “groaning creation” (Rom. 8:19) that God has reserved for his own final redemptive act in the return of Jesus Christ. Third, Moltmann’s yielding to the ecumenical idea of “contextuality” dissolves the concept of salvation into a number of widely disparate experiences. There is no clear recognition of the one basic reality of salvation that transcends all its specific expressions and consequences.

Typical of this non-theological dissolution of the biblical message of Christ’s universal salvation for all sinners who believe in him is the following statement:

In this sense it can be said, for example, that salvation is the peace of the people in Viet Nam, independence in Angola, justice and reconciliation in Northern Ireland and release from the captivity of power in the North-Atlantic Community, or personal conversion in the release of a submerged society into hope, or of new life styles amidst corporate self-interest and lovelessness.

Here, under a seemingly biblical cover, the concept of salvation has been so broadened and deprived of its Christian distinctiveness that any liberating experience can be called “salvation.” Accordingly, any participation in liberating efforts would be called “mission.”

That this would be the Bangkok interpretation of salvation and mission was predictable. The World Council of Churches should not expect, however, that evangelicals all over the world will accept it. We now are challenged to present the biblical alternatives by articulating our faith and by acting accordingly in obedience to Christ’s Great Commission.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

The good ship Oikoumene, owned and operated by the World Council of Churches, slid off the ways at Amsterdam in 1948. It began its maiden voyage captained by Willem A. Visser’t Hooft, who set sail for the New Jerusalem. Now, twenty-five years and two captains later, the ship, loaded with close to three hundred churches, has run into stormy weather. Many people are asking where it is, where it is headed, and whether its compass is accurate.

A short while ago Oikoumene put into port at Bangkok, Thailand, for a World Conference on Salvation Today, sponsored by the WCC’s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME). That conference, held from December 29, 1972, to January 9, 1973, was followed by the Third Assembly of the CWME January 9–12. The World Conference was attended by several hundred participants, the Third Assembly by 126 voting members.

The last major WCC meeting, the Assembly at Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968, had been attended by a substantial number of radical secularist theologians, and also by a large contingent of left-wing European and North American young people. The Bangkok participants were those interested in missionary matters, representing what to the evangelical observer is the best side of the World Council of Churches.

Two new officers took their places in the administrative structures of the WCC at Bangkok. Philip Potter, a West Indian who formerly was the director of the CWME, succeeded Eugene Carson Blake (who recently retired) as general secretary of the WCC, and Emilio Castro, a Uruguayan, took Potter’s place as director of the CWME. And so two of the highest ranking officers of the WCC are from the third world.

To understand what went on at Bangkok, one needs some knowledge of the history of Christian missions for the past one hundred years. Noted historian Kenneth Scott Latourette called the nineteenth century the great century for missionary advance. The great advance began with William Carey in the 1790s. During the hundred years that followed, European and North American church-controlled and independent missionary agencies multiplied. For the most part the denominations and the independent agencies went their own ways without particular regard to other sending groups. With the dawning of the twentieth century a great change took place, a change that would at last produce the ecumenical movement and its structural form, the World Council of Churches.

The Ecumenical Missionary Conference convened in 1900 in New York, followed within ten years by the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference. At both, denominational and non-denominational missionary agencies were represented. The impulse generated by these missionary conclaves and particularly by Edinburgh led to the formation of two inter-denominational organizations: the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA), founded in 1917 and including in its fellowship the so-called faith missionary societies, and the International Missionary Council (IMC), formed in 1921, the constituent councils of which were open to denominational and non-denominational societies.

During the period between 1921 and the beginning of World War II, the IMC convened two international missionary conferences, one at Jerusalem in 1928 and the other at Madras in 1938. The papers from these conferences give evidence of wide theological cleavages. By 1921, theological liberals, schooled in German higher-critical rationalism, had captured many of the theological seminaries. A Pandora’s box of variant and heretical theological views had been opened, and all sorts of deviations and accommodations crept out. Universalism, syncretism, theological inclusivism, as well as patent unbelief found adherents within the churches.

During this time several important events influenced missions. Karl Barth’s work on Romans had appeared in 1918. In revolt against German liberalism, Barth sought a return to a revelatory and biblical theology, and he became the father and leading exponent of neo-orthodoxy. Later he wrote a massive systematic theology in which he dealt in part with God’s election of men to salvation in Jesus Christ. Barth’s idea of election opened the door wide to universalism, the view that all men are in Christ already, whether they know it or not, and shall at last be saved. Through this open door came the theology of Nels Ferré, Norman Pittenger, Bishop James Pike, and Paul Verghese, among others.

A second significant event was the publication of Rethinking Missions by William E. Hocking of Harvard as part of the massive Layman’s Foreign Missions Inquiry. The United States had become the leading missionary sending nation in the world, and these books hit like a thunderbolt. The Layman’s Inquiry vigorously assaulted the basic theological foundations on which missions rested. Latourette wrote: “Many of the most earnest of the constituency of the missionary enterprise cherished convictions which were quite the opposite of those represented by Rethinking Missions” (A History of the Expansion of Christianity, VII, 52). Virtually every American denomination had to justify and defend its foreign missionary program among its people.

Although at Madras in 1938 it could be seen that non-evangelical views had made progress in the missionary movement, the major decisions of that conference were evangelical in tone and the larger proportion of the career missionaries were evangelical in theology. The discussions at Madras centered on Hendrik Kraemer’s book The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, which was essentially a response to Hocking’s work. In a new preface to the second edition Kraemer took pains to deny that his book was “fundamentalist,” a charge circulated widely by critics of his work. There was some uncertainty as to the meaning of “biblical realism” as he used the term, but in the main his thesis was quite clear. He laid the axe to the root of syncretism, showing that any similarities between the Christian and the non-Christian religions were actually dissimilarities.

At the same time that the missionary agencies were banding together, a movement was afoot to bind the denominations together into a larger fellowship. In the United States it took the form of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ, which later changed its name to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Meanwhile, on the international scene two other ecumenical organizations appeared, their impetus having come in part from the 1910 Edinburgh missionary conference. They were the World Conference on Faith and Order and the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work. These two organizations merged to form the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948. The WCC was similar to the National Council of Churches, most of whose members joined the WCC, except that it was international in scope.

The International Missionary Council, however, did not join the WCC in 1948. It was still assumed that missions was the business of the churches, and from 1948 on ecumenical leaders worked to bring the IMC into the World Council of Churches. The problem was that the IMC included in its membership non-denominational agencies and a number of evangelical mission boards that wanted no part of the WCC, which from its inception was theologically inclusive and had as its announced intention the creation of one organically united church. Finally, in 1961 the IMC was integrated into the WCC as the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. It is interesting to note that the effort to create unity was divisive in its outcome, for the faith missions, among others, quit the IMC when it went into the WCC.

The Commission on World Mission and Evangelism held an international gathering at Mexico City in 1963, and the recent one at Bangkok was its second. The Mexico City meetings showed that the conciliar movement was moving away from the historic conception of the mission of the Church. Whatever defects had attended the IMC conclaves at Jerusalem in 1928 and Madras in 1938, both of these conferences in their plenary sessions defined evangelism and the mission of the Church in rather traditional terms. By 1963, however, a substantial shift away from the historic position of the missionary agencies was evident.

In 1968 the WCC itself met at Uppsala, and the theological gaps that had appeared in the Mexico City CWME meetings became yawning chasms. The emphasis at Uppsala was on humanization, secularization, socio-political involvement, economic development of the third-world nations, the elimination of racism, revolution, and a virulent anti-American feeling that centered on the war in Viet Nam.

Uppsala clearly had a polarizing effect. Before the meeting took place, Donald McGavran of the School of World Mission at Fuller Seminary posed the question of what the World Council intended to do about two billion people who had never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The WCC statement prepared before Uppsala was wholly unsatisfactory from an evangelical perspective. The Gospel of personal salvation through the substitutionary atonement of Christ on Calvary was supplanted by a secularized, this-worldly version of social action as the mission of the Church.

In an editorial entitled “Will Bangkok Be a Watershed or a Washout?,” Paul S. Rees of World Vision, who has been as warm a friend of the ecumenical movement as any evangelical, picked out the observation by Visser ’t Hooft (former general secretary of the WCC) that there is both a vertical and a horizontal aspect to the Christian faith, and that those who neglect the horizontal, i.e., “responsibility for the needy in any part of the world,” are “just as much guilty of heresy as those who deny this or that article of the Faith.” But at Uppsala the WCC, when considering the declaration on “Renewal in Mission,” “fell between two stools,” says Rees:

It was not so much thought through as tinkered through, with the verticalists and the horizontalists making last-minute efforts to scotch one another by squeezing in a term here or a phrase there that would salvage their side of the debate. In the end neither side was satisfied. The horizontalists, alas, carried off more laurels than the verticalists.

Rees seemed to imply that the struggle is only a matter of over-emphasizing the vertical or the horizontal at the expense of the other. This interpretation is open to question. Rees does admit, however, that there are those who wish “to substitute humanization for evangelism,” and quotes Dr. George Johnston, dean of religious studies at McGill University, who dismisses Christ’s atonement on the cross and says “eternal bliss conveys almost no meaning.”

The changes evangelicals at Uppsala secured in the “Renewal in Mission” report only served to highlight the basic differences, for they made the total report self-contradictory. It was evident that the WCC had departed from the positions it held at Amsterdam in 1948. The mission of the Church was now identified with social action, not with personal evangelism.

Against this backdrop the CWME met at Bangkok. In a report entitled From Mexico City to Bangkok the true nature of the struggle was delineated. The report stated:

We see the debate revolving around three major problems:

1. On the understanding of the Bible: Some see in the Bible the expression of unchanging truth which can be formulated and repeated. Others see salvation in the Bible as an ongoing event into which we enter.

2. On the understanding of human history: Some see in the biblical story of liberation, in both Old and New Testament, direct scriptural support for the quest for liberation, whether personal, political, economic or cultural. Others warn that the Bible is concerned with ultimate spiritual issues, not to be confused with temporal power struggles.

3. On the place of the Church in God’s purpose and work for salvation: Many find it difficult to make a clear distinction, in terms of being saved or not saved, between the fellowship of the Church and human fellowship. Others insist that the boundaries of the Church as the locus of salvation must be maintained.

These statements about the Bible, human history, and the Church fairly represent the basic differences that exist within the WCC. To reconcile them is impossible except through a synthesis of opposites, and this, of course, evangelicals could not accept.

At Bangkok the divergent viewpoints surfaced quickly. On the first Sunday the Reverend Wichean Watakeecharoen, general secretary of the Church of Christ in Thailand, preached a thoroughly biblical sermon on salvation by grace through faith in Christ. The mimeographed conference journal that appeared the following day contained comments on that service. A German participant said Watakeecharoen’s sermon was “very bad, representing the revivalistic theology of the Church of Thailand. The enumeration of ‘so many souls saved’ slaps the whole dialogue program in the face.” No approving statements were printed, though some hearers were delighted with the sermon.

WCC staff member Thomas Wieser presented the first major paper to the conference, on the worldwide study of the theme “Salvation Today” during the four preceding years. The report noted the disparate opinions of what salvation is: from the concept of personal salvation from sin by faith in Christ, to the statement by the Methodist Church of the Ivory Coast that “‘salvation in the current sense means deliverance from illness, war, or slavery’ and is associated by many with the deliverance from colonialism and forced labor.” Wieser concluded his report by saying, “Reflectors will guide the conference in the task of interpreting the diversity of views and experiences in the light of Christian tradition.” If they did, it was not noticeable; no definitive statement appeared on what salvation really is.

The second major address was given by M. M. Thomas of India, chairman of the WCC Central Committee. He spoke of the need for spiritual salvation, saying that the mission of the Church “is to participate in the movements of human liberation in our time in such a way as to witness to Jesus Christ as the Source, the Judge and the Redeemer of the human spirituality and its orientation as it is at work in these movements, and therefore as the Saviour of Man today.” Thomas went on to open the door wide to syncretism and to a denial of the uniqueness of Christianity:

We are living at a time when we are deeply conscious of pluralism in the world—pluralism of human situations and needs, of varied religions and secular cultures, with different traditions of metaphysics, ideologies and world-views, in terms of which Christians themselves seek to express their commitment to and confession of Christ. So much so that any kind of a unity in the doctrine of Christ or of salvation in Christ, which has been the goal of traditional Christian churches, is to my mind impossible even of conception except in religious imperialistic terms. As a historian of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, has recently said that on the grounds also of the loss of authority of the established churches today, “the old ideal of a unified or systematic Christian truth has gone. For this the ecumenical movement is too late,” leaving a situation of “open variety, of optional alternatives,” everyone choosing what suits him best (Questions of Religious Truth, pp. 34, 35). Then, of course, the question what kind of a criterion of Christian faith can we lay down in a pluralistic age, is sharply raised. Dr. Hans Küng, when he visited India recently, said that the criterion of faith could be that the believer should in some form acknowledge the Person of Jesus as “decisive for life,” that is to say, to translate in my terms, decisive for the knowledge of Ultimate Reality and the realization of the ultimate meaning of life and its fulfillment here and hereafter.

His concluding remark was illuminating: “I leave all the unanswered questions for this conference of experts to tackle.”

The third major paper was the report of Philip Potter, new general secretary of the WCC and formerly director of the CWME. Potter ranged far and wide and devoted more time to sociology, politics, and economics than to the Gospel and evangelism. This was not unexpected: the report was intended to give an account of “what has been happening in our world since 1963,” and for this decade the controlling theme of the WCC and its agencies has been social action. Potter did admit that “there are strong voices which have claimed that the CWME has lost its integrity and its raison d’être through integration [i.e., by being incorporated into the WCC], I hope this issue will be honestly faced at this meeting, for what is at stake is not merely a structural arrangement within the WCC, but our whole understanding of mission.” Later he added, “Our fathers in the missionary movement avoided the pain of theological and ecclesiological controversy. We dare not.” But when Peter Beyerhaus of Tübingen asked the conference to consider the theological crisis in missions as expounded in the Frankfurt Declaration, he was rudely and decisively rebuffed by Potter and by third-world spokesmen who argued that the Declaration was peculiarly German and was irrelevant to the third world. The Western world, the spokesmen said, should not export its problems to the third world. This effectively shut the door to any real theological controversy over the basic issues, even those already set forth in the From Mexico City to Bangkok booklet.

Potter, an articulate, friendly, and engaging speaker, used his position and power in other ways, too. It was he who told a reporter from the Bangkok Post,

The eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt succeed,” has led the world to the brink of annihilation. One doesn’t have to look far to see how fear of losing has kept America’s big power boys from accepting the fact that with all their massive efforts they have been beaten by the ‘little yellow people’ in Viet Nam.”

Potter also pulled no punches when he said that “serious heresy” exists in the churches (i.e., WCC churches) on the part of those who profess the Christian faith but are not obedient to its demands to change the economic, political, and social structures. Since the minimal doctrinal commitment of the WCC does not deal with this matter and since churches are free to believe as they choose, it was hard to appreciate his “ex cathedra” judgment of what constitutes heresy. It was also Potter who, in his Christmas message to the churches, said that salvation equals liberation and that in Jesus’s time salvation “signified liberation from all that impeded or restricted the life of persons and societies—whether sickness of body or mind, ignorance, indifference and fear, calamities of every kind, injustice by fellow citizens or by foreigners.”

Apart from listening to the three major papers, participants in the conference and the assembly spent most of their time in section and group meetings. Out of them came a plethora of pronouncements but no clear, unambiguous statement of the meaning of salvation today, yesterday, or tomorrow. The public bulletin boards did reveal some interesting opinions on the matter. One sign proclaimed that “People matter; people suffer; salvation is in sharing suffering.” Following an unscheduled session on China in which one delegate praised Chairman Mao as the saviour, this sign appeared: “Salvation=God save China from ‘conversion.’” Professor Moltmann of Tübingen diagrammed his view of “salvation in, by and through economic justice, political freedom and cultural change.” Some participants thought that the theological statement of Section II, largely the work of Moltmann, should stand as the “theology of Bangkok,” but WCC staff member van den Heuvel reminded the conference that theological perspectives had also come from conference addresses, worship experiences, conversations, drama, and art.

the great commission

The risen Christ did not leave the fulfillment of his program to the whims of his disciples. Their whims led in other directions. They had to be rallied from their stupor, ordered out of their confusion.

The Master minced no words. Authority he had, backed by irrefutable credentials: graveclothes that had been abandoned, a Roman seal that had been violated, a cruel death that had been transcended.

The risen Lord took charge. Obedience he demanded, couched in undeniable commands: Go and make disciples, baptize and teach.

To the disciples’ uncertainty Jesus gave firm correction: no nostalgic return to their homes, no fearful huddling with one another, no anxious retreat from the world. Go was the way the command began.

To the disciples’ mission Jesus gave specific directions: Make disciples—not spectators, but full-time students in Christ’s school; all nations—without favor or prejudice, individuals, clans, tribes, peoples; baptizing them—all paganism rejected, total loyalty to the Father, Son, Spirit; teaching them—a new curriculum, written and illustrated by the Master.

The Saviour left no doubt. His presence he pledged, expressed in an incredible commitment: he would be with them, everywhere, through all time.

Obligated by his authority, captivated by his commands, motivated by his promise, they went. Like runners in a relay race they went. Because they went, we heard. Now the baton is with us—not to keep but to carry.—DAVID ALLAN HUBBARD, president, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

The spirit that brooded over participants was one of powerlessness, frustration, and despair. This was true not only of the evangelicals in the WCC, some of whom openly expressed sorrow over the lack of emphasis on evangelism and the fulfillment of the Great Commission, but also of those whose interest lies in a gospel of social salvation. Perhaps it was best expressed by the prayer that came from Section I:

For Christ’s Church on earth,

confused about its message, uncertain about its role,

divided in many ways, polarized between different understandings,

unimaginative in its proclamation, undisciplined in its fellowship,

we pray: Out of the depths we cry unto Thee, O Lord!

For ourselves in this Conference,

overwhelmed by our impressions, torn apart by prejudice,

often in doubt, plagued by frustrations,

struggling for honesty, for understanding of each other,

crying for love, searching for justice,

we pray: Out of the depths we cry unto Thee, O Lord!

Right now the WCC is in a crisis situation, for it appears to be unsure of its message, its mission, and its mandate. The good ship Oikoumene has been afloat for a quarter of a century; now it remains to be seen whether the new helmsmen, Potter and Castro, can keep it off the shoals.

Among the things the World Conference and/or the CWME Assembly did were:

1. Blasted the United States and President Nixon on Viet Nam in a statement generously larded with such phrases as “ruthlessly destroyed,” “blasphemous mockery of peace making,” “holocaust of destruction,” “brutal power politics,” “sinister example of imperialism,” “wanton destruction,” and “blind reign of terror.” “In this war salvation is at stake,” the statement said, although “the Christian community itself is divided on this issue.” (84 ayes, 11 nays, 20 abstentions.)

2. Condemned Portuguese colonialism in Southern Africa, particularly Angola, with a recommendation favoring Christian support of the national liberation movement. In the assembly an amendment to include racism in Uganda as also wrong was defeated by a vote of 20 for and 30 against.

3. Approved an affirmation from Bible Study Group 3 that stated in part:

To the individual [Christ] comes with power to liberate him from every evil and sin, from every power in heaven [!] and earth, and from every threat of life and death. To the world he comes as Lord of the universe, with deep compassion for the poor and the hungry, to liberate the powerless and the oppressed.

4. Approved the report of Section II, which said in part:

a. Our concentration upon the social, economic and political implications of the Gospel does not in any way deny the personal and eternal dimensions of salvation. Rather, we would emphasize that the personal, social, individual and corporate aspects of salvation are so inter-related that they are inseparable.

b. There is no economic justice without political freedom, no political freedom without economic justice. There is no social justice without solidarity, no solidarity without social justice. There is no justice, no human dignity, no solidarity without hope, no hope without justice, dignity and solidarity.

c. Salvation is the peace of the people in Viet Nam, independence in Angola, justice and reconciliation in Northern Ireland and release from the captivity of power in the North Atlantic community … [but not in the Warsaw Pact!].

5. Approved the report of Section I, which said, among other things: “Our eyes will be keenly open to discover what He is doing among people of other faiths and ideologies.” “Other living faiths … have a mission.” “We shall rejoice in the common ground we discover.”

6. Urged “missionary agencies to give serious consideration to the resolutions by the WCC Central Committee in Utrecht concerning the withdrawal of investments from Southern Africa.”

7. Recommended that serious attention be given to the possibility of supporting and encouraging local groups of action and protest against unjust economic structures (e.g., groups organizing a boycott of U. S. imports in areas of U. S. economic domination).

8. Expressed “particular concern regarding relationships between conservative evangelical groups and churches traditionally related to conciliar groupings.”

9. Voted that the CWME would “offer its services and make itself available to the Congress of World Evangelization to be convened at Lausanne, July 1974.”

10. Agreed “to promote and support self-tax of individuals and churches everywhere as an expression of transfer of power from the powerful to the powerless” (a resolution initiated by the X minus Y Action, an action group in Holland).

Conspicuously missing from the meeting: any condemnation of Communist oppression and exploitation; any reference to subjugated peoples such as the Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians; any reference to the Communist Warsaw Pact, though the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was panned; any criticism of socialism, despite repeated criticisms of capitalism; any adequate recognition of what God is doing through the Jesus movement, Key 73, the Berlin and other congresses on evangelism, Campus Crusade for Christ, or mass evangelism; any emphasis on the two billion unreached people without Christ or any genuine enthusiasm to harness the resources of the churches to finish the task of world evangelization according to the terms of the Great Commission (which I never heard mentioned during the entire gathering).

The WCC seems obsessed with the vision of establishing a truly just society among all men, saved and unsaved, atheistic Communists as well as committed Christians. Beneath the surface there lurks the terrible danger of the false promise of a golden age among men, an age of a world without injustice or oppression. Such a vision represents a sad misreading of history and reveals a mistaken view of the nature of man. The WCC is to be commended for its concern for social justice, and every Christian in and out of the ecumenical movement should likewise be concerned. But attempts to do away with injustice and oppression should be based upon one cold fact: oppression and injustice can be alleviated, in some areas considerably reduced, but they cannot be eliminated, even as the individual Christian can be improved in his personal life but not perfected so long as he is in the flesh. Sin will be with us until Christ returns, and as long as sin persists there will be injustice and oppression of all kinds. The problem will remain insoluble, though partially remediable, until sin is eliminated forever; no human efforts, no earnest pronouncements, and no illusory idealism can alter this basic fact.

Virtually nothing was said at Bangkok about the command of Christ to evangelize the world, i.e., to finish the task of preaching the Gospel of personal repentance and faith to all men. Nor was anything said of the two billion who have never heard the Gospel, except in a single sentence in which Philip Potter dismissed the debate over this matter as futile. There was no clear-cut sense of the lostness of men without Christ and the fact that if they die in their sins they are eternally separated from God. The great stress on salvation as liberation from political, social, and economic oppression might very well have been just as much at home in a purely humanistic or secular conference.

Bible Study Group II seemed to get a little closer to the truth in its statement that “salvation can only be conceived as liberation from sin.” But the statement goes on to say: “It is necessary, however, to state clearly what sin means and to name without fear its present forms, especially its social and political forms.” Nowhere was sin or liberation from it clearly defined in the biblical sense. Sin is the lack of conformity to the will of God. While sin may be manifested in corporate ways, responsibility always lies at the doors of individuals. Society as such cannot commit adultery, for instance; individual sinners do this. Salvation in the biblical sense means the removal of the guilt and penalty of sin for those who come to God through Jesus Christ. It also means the beginning of deliverance from the power of sin in the individual’s life and the end of the presence of sin when Christ returns.

From all this, then, some conclusions:

1. The CWME and the WCC have in them a substantial number of people who are theologically evangelical as well as a broad spectrum of other views from a pale liberalism to extreme ideological leftism.

2. Control of the ecumenical movement lies in the hands of those who are not theologically evangelical. Evangelicals exist by sufferance; their presence is welcomed, but they have no place in the power structure.

3. Neither Uppsala nor Bangkok produced any full-orbed statement about salvation, conversion, evangelism, or the mission of the Church that is biblically sound and therefore acceptable to evangelicals. Indeed, their statements are inimical to the evangelical viewpoint. The breach has been widened very considerably since Amsterdam in 1948.

4. Evangelicals within the WCC have been looking for encouragement and help in the pursuit of what they believe to be the major mission of the Church (the taking of the Gospel of Christ to all men everywhere, in the power of the Holy Spirit and with the hope that soon their king, the Lord Jesus, will return). Their expectations have been disappointed.

5. Evangelicals within the ecumenical movement have much more in common with their evangelical brethren outside the ecumenical movement than with non-evangelicals in the WCC. But many non-conciliar evangelicals have refused to join hands with their brethren who through church affiliations they cherish are related to the WCC. This has made impossible an alliance of all evangelicals in the cause of missionary outreach.

6. It is time for evangelicals in and out of the WCC to join together to do what all of them are committed to do as believers in the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus, i.e., to finish the task of world evangelization as soon as possible. The International Congress on World Evangelization, which will convene in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, should give the most serious consideration to the creation of some form of continuing fellowship or organization that will have for its binding power a common commitment to the task of world evangelization.

7. Evangelicals should say to those who truly believe that salvation is deliverance from political, economic, and social oppression: “You do your thing and we’ll pray for you; we’ll do our thing and you pray for us.”

8. Evangelical unity and commitment to the evangelistic task are not enough. There must be a vital spiritual renewal in which the Holy Spirit provides the dynamic required to complete the Great Commission as well as persevering and prevailing prayer, without which no spiritual movement can get off the ground.

Will evangelicals catch the vision, see the possibilities, join hands, and move out for Christ in this new way?

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

I am writing this in Florida, looking out a window at the Gulf of Mexico. The warm, sunny weather is a welcome change from the cold and rain of March in Washington, and the respite has given me time to revise and nearly complete a book manuscript that I may entitle The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. It deals with worldliness—what it is, how to overcome it. It starts at the Garden of Eden and ends up in the new Jerusalem, the city of God. But enough of that.

This issue contains two articles evaluating the recent Bangkok missionary meetings of the World Council of Churches. The central issue, one that has plagued the Church for a generation, is that of the mission of the Church. It is possible to define the Church’s mission biblically and definitively without fulfilling that mission. It is also possible for the Church to make clear what its understanding of its mission is not in words but in activities and programs. Every reader whose denomination is related to the WCC will be interested in these analyses. Both will be included in a forthcoming collection of articles called The Evangelical Response to Bangkok, edited by Ralph D. Winter. The book will be available around mid-April from the publisher, William Carey Library (533 Hermosa Street, South Pasadena, California 91030), for $1.45.

Of anglicans can be said what Longfellow wrote of a certain little girl: when they are good they are very, very good (the Book of Common Prayer, Bishop Butler, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, John Stott), and when they are bad they are horrid (the Cambridge radicals, Bishop Robinson, Bishop Pike, Joseph Fletcher, Thomas Altizer). It was therefore with ambivalent feelings that I attended the recent Inaugural Symposium at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, honoring the seminary’s new president and dean, Armen Jorjorian, known in Episcopal circles for a creative institutional-chaplaincy program in Texas. The Right Reverend John E. Hines was on hand to preach, while “futurologist” Robert Theobald served as main speaker.

To everyone’s surprise, Theobald appeared not in person but on videotape from Arizona to deliver his keynote address (and the moderator brought the house down by noting that this was being done “the Anglican way—via media”). Following the taped address, discussion groups met to pose questions to Theobald, and he answered them over a conference telephone circuit.

Theobald set forth his own approach ot the future against the background of three other current views with which he strongly disagrees. First, there is the “positive extrapolist,” such as Daniel Bell (Work and Its Discontents) who sees the future as a linear, positive extension and expansion of the present. This approach naïvely accepts a pro-Western doctrine of the inevitable progress of present technological society. In reaction, one encounters the “negative extrapolists” (the SDS mentality) who agree with the positive extrapolists that the future will consist of a larger-than-life present, but believe this will be an inferno, not a paradiso. Face to face with this overwhelming technological cacatopia, some opt out: the third futurology, an “intra-worldly mysticism” classically expressed by Charles Reich in The Greening of America, proclaims the gospel of “do your own thing” and expects some extraordinary mechanism to set things right.

For Theobald, a socio-economist by training, these three models of the future are hopelessly simplistic and fatalistic. A strong fan of science fiction, he shares its perspective of an open future, capable of multifaceted development.

As his views are set forth in his recent work An Alternative Future for America II and his anthology Futures Conditional, Theobald holds that we are entering a world where the goal-oriented Protestant work ethic is being replaced by a “process-orientation.” No absolute and inevitable goals force mankind into Skinner boxes. Maslow’s self-actualization thesis is correct: we can and must “invent the future.”

According to Theobald, the answer to the future is not destructive revolution but constructive evolution, through such changes as the guaranteed income, the blending of work and leisure, the creation of larger social units than the “nuclear family,” and the development of new dwelling patterns suitable for these units (such as modifications of the Navajo “hogan”). We must take the Whole Earth Catalog seriously when it says: “We are gods and we might as well get good at it.”

The discussion after the lecture predictably elicited a variety of reactions to Theobald’s model of the future. Old Testament scholar Harvey Guthrie solemnly asserted that it is legitimate biblically to say “we are gods” (Ps. 82): “the image of God is a role thing.” “But how about humility?” a member of the audience asked. This gave Theobald a chance to expand on his theology:

My view of human nature is Chardin’s: as man conceives the future so he will become. I don’t know the distinction between God and man any more. Where two or three are gathered in the name of cooperation, God is there. We must be humbler gods.

Thomas Altizer said he was “much disturbed” by Theobald’s views. Theobald offers a “new gnosticism,” he said, particularly reprehensible because it rejects revolution: “We must have revolution, for the Christian can only choose death, not life.” Altizer rang the changes on his ninetenth-century revolutionary view of religion, setting it forth in even more radical terms than he did during the death-of-God controversy in his book The Descent Into Hell. Only by Hegelian dialectic process and Nietzschean eternal recurrence can we “arrive at a new, revolutionary view of consciousness.”

The only put-down to the diffuse theologizing of Altizer and of Theobald came—of all places—from the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Don Browning. Concerning Altizer:

Don’t take him too seriously. The church must not make his mistake of using terms loosely or in the next ten to fifteen years we will lose even more of our credibility.

Of Theobald:

It is good that he rejects the ecological mysticism our church people are falling into, but while we are trying to dig ourselves out of a mastery of life motif, he challenges us to develop new models of mastery. Religion for him is a vast control device. He may be a good Jew and a good Greek, but he is not a very good Christian.

A small black woman in the audience added the only other word of gospel to appear in the entire session: “You must be born again and not try to do it all yourself.” I heard her mutter to herself on the way out: “I can’t stand any more of this; I’m going home.”

Let us hope that she is not one of the last true Episcopalians. Seabury-Western had ninety theological students ten years ago; today it has sixty—and this decline is reflected throughout the Episcopal seminaries of America. That once noble church has so weakened that it could not even discipline Bishop Pike, who denied the incarnation and the Trinity; a death-of-God theologian is still considered one of its luminaries; and it can hold a symposium on the future without once mentioning the return of our Lord Jesus Christ to judge the quick and the dead. The Episcopal liturgies remain magnificent, but, to use Pike’s famous line, they are sung, not said—regarded aesthetically rather than as affirmations of factual truth.

During the inauguration of Seabury-Western’s president, the new incumbent was presented with a Bible and exhorted: “Be among us as one who proclaims the word.” The New Testament lesson was Second Timothy 3:14–4:5: “The Scriptures are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.… Preach the word.… The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine.… They shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned to myths.” Is anybody listening? The future depends on it.