Page 6131 – Christianity Today (2024)

The enduring realities are anchored in the God revealed in Christ

The poet Edmund Spenser speaks of “the ever-whirling wheele of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway.” And down the years, peaceful or war-tormented, change has indeed been the order of time. Watching history, we are tempted to say with Shelley: “Naught may endure but mutability.”

The mainspring of movement is in all things; nothing stands still. Seemingly immobile matter is but energy in prescribed patterns of motion. Sun and sand, oceans and blood-rills, star-swarms and morning glories—something is happening to all of them, always. “Get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them,” said Marcus Aurelius.

Yet paradoxically change has ever been disturbing to mankind. Many a person might say with the character in Browning’s Paracelsus: “I detest all change, and most a change in aught I loved long since.” Men like ruts. They cry, as did the man in Jesus’ parable who tasted the new wine: “The old is better!”

Change often disconcerts Christians; yet from time to time transitions must be made. “The old order changeth” and the new invades our lives. Theology and philosophy are affected; doctrines may need reinterpretation; translations of truth may crowd in upon us. Sometimes we are shocked, sometimes amused. We sweat in agony of spirit when some scientist threatens to mar that awful opening sentence of the Bible—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But we wag our heads and grin when in place of the King James Version’s, “Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss,” we find the paraphrase, “Give a handshake all round.”

In dead seriousness evangelicals face such innovations as the rise of the “new morality”; or the stand of a chaplain in an allgirl school who in a campus chapel says, “Sex is fun.… There are no laws attached to sex. I repeat: absolutely no laws. There is nothing you ought to do or ought not to do. There are no rules to the game, so to speak.” This is practically a reversal of the Bible-minded man’s philosophy of sex.

Mores, manners, laws, behavior may change; but what changes shall the evangelical make ethically? Is the kind of sexual activity forbidden in the Scriptures allowable to a disciple of Jesus in 1965? The Word of God orders men always to speak the truth; can a Christian side with the businessman who argues that to do this is to go bankrupt?

The Bible reveals the necessity of change. We see Israel changing, politically and religiously, in the Old Testament. We observe the transition from the Old to the New Testament among Christians. “The priesthood being changed,” wrote a scribe of the primitive Church, “there is made of necessity a change also of the law” (Heb. 7:12). To be sure, the writer was speaking of a change in a priestly system rather than in the moral order; nevertheless the change is genuine.

Turning from religious institutions to the individual, we discover that one must be changed to become a Christian. From this initial transformation the process continues—“We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Ford” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Beyond this time and place the transfiguration is to continue. “… we shall be changed,” said the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:52). “We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body …” (Phil. 3:20b, 21).

What further transformations God has planned for men in an age and order beyond our own we are not told. “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change!” cried Tennyson in Locksley Hall. But we come to impenetrable mystery at this point and must await further revelation.

In the meantime, we make changes that promise spiritual fulfillment while avoiding others that might involve the risk of eternal ruin. Paul speaks of those who change the glory of the immortal God into an image of mortal men and the truth of God into a lie (Rom. 1:23–25), and Jeremiah lamented: “My people have changed their Glory for a useless thing!” (Jer. 2:11, Moffat).

Knowing what changes to make and what ones not to make is a great asset for the Christian. However, the changes must always be in something or someone other than God. Christ needs no changing; nor does the Spirit with whom we communicate; nor do the Scriptures, which “cannot be broken”; nor does Christian ethics. Our manners, methods, and customs, our activities and attitudes, may need alteration; but the Gospel of grace and the Word of God are unchanging.

They err disastrously who imagine that because the world changes, God also must be subject to change. The “growingup” God of the “process” theologians is a stranger to the Scriptures, as well as a poor risk for man’s future. The God revealed in Christ is our last best hope. He is “the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

Change is often needed. But God does not change. “The heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall pass away.… They shall be changed like any garment. But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end” (Heb. 1:10–12, NEB). God remains; with him is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”—

Hastings, Michigan.

Each year divorce tears apart the homes of 750,000 children

Four thousand times a day a man and woman stand before a clergyman or magistrate to be united in matrimony. At that point they are at the door of heaven or at the gates of hell; they are beginning a life either of marital happiness or of what someone has called “conjugal infelicity.”

Many a romance has collapsed under the strain that comes when two people try to make a life together. That pretty girl who was always well groomed now spends half the day in a housecoat with her hair in curlers. That young athlete is beginning to put on weight around the middle. Before they were married, she admired him for his strength as he made end runs and touchdowns. Now when she asks him to put up the screens or mow the lawn, his strength seems to vanish. Somehow Hollywood does not tell us the whole story when it shows the hero and heroine riding off into the sunset. The real test of love lies ahead, as two people who before have lived separately now live together and attempt to adjust to each other’s faults and idiosyncrasies.

Nowhere is there greater optimism than at the marriage altar. Many young people stumble into marriage convinced that love conquers all. And yet one out of every four new marriages ends in divorce. (Among teenagers the rate is three times as high.) Each year 750,000 children have their homes torn apart by divorce. All this indicates that our ideas about love and marriage need re-examination.

What has gone wrong with American marriage? As a Navy chaplain, I have done a lot of marriage counseling. During one year I talked to many young people whose marriages were disintegrating; the longest any of them had been married was five months. One couple who had been married six weeks and another who had been married five weeks were both ready to give up.

What does the Bible say about marriage? What does God expect of married people? As the people asked the Old Testament prophet, “Is there any word from the Lord?” In this day of promiscuity and divorce, we have heard from Hollywood and Ernest Hemingway and Dr. Kinsey. The Christian Church now needs to return to the Bible to find the theology of marriage. Let us give our attention, then, to three ingredients not just of marriage but of holy matrimony.

Love is the basic ingredient. Yet so many unfortunate couples suffer through a loveless marriage because no one ever told them what love is. Their life together is one of frustration rather than fulfillment, because their philosophy of love is based on the idealism of a Hollywood musical, the perversion of a character in Tennessee Williams, the escapades of an Elizabeth Taylor, or the sob-stories of True Romance magazine.

One of the tragedies of American life is that love is being defined for us by those who have never experienced it. We are hearing about marriage from those whose own marriages—one or two or more—have failed. We have listened to the pied pipers of sex-obsessed movies and literature. Now we are reaping the consequences—the young man who wants his girlfriend or fiancée to prove her love by compromising her purity, though he is not willing to prove his love by waiting; or the young married couple (or not-so-young couple) who tell the marriage counselor that they just do not love each other any longer. The fact is that in the true sense they never did love each other. What they consider love is sadly like the degraded concept of it in “adults only” movies or in books that talk about “love in the raw,” or “free love,” or “love for sale.” The cruel hoax undermining our society is the notion that love is only physical. Capitalizing on this error, Madison Avenue tries to persuade us that to be loved we must use the right kind of toothpaste, bath soap, and hand lotion, and that domestic tranquillity depends upon keeping Anacin in the medicine chest and Billy’s bike out of the driveway.

Although we are all fairly well read on the subject of love, most of us have been reading the wrong books. We need to ponder what Paul wrote in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians: “Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.” We need to listen also to Shakespeare’s words: “… Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/ … Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” We need to hear Solomon as he says: “Love is stronger than death.”

The trouble began when we stopped listening to Solomon and St. Paul and began listening to Sigmund Freud and Hugh Hefner; when we stopped listening to Shakespeare and Robert Browning and started listening to Bertrand Russell and Henry Miller; when we stopped listening to God and began listening to unregenerate man. That was when we began confusing love with lust, and when marriage started leading to the gates of hell instead of to the door of heaven. It used to be that a person with a shameful past moved away to a place where no one would know what he had done. Now he writes a book about it, Hollywood makes the book into a movie, and we call it sophistication, art, realism.

Conjugal love has its God-ordained physical expression. Suppose someone tells you that there is a fire in your house. Whether this is good or bad depends on where the fire is. If it is in the furnace, the stove, or the fireplace, it is good. If it is in the roof or the walls, it is bad. In the right place, fire provides warmth and comfort; in the wrong place, it destroys what is good. Lust is destructive not only of human relationships but of the human personality as well. It is impurity at the deepest level of the spirit, and quick boredom follows. But the physical expression of love within marriage is an endless road of profound satisfaction and ever-deepening union.

God made us the way we are and told us how to live. We are free to violate his laws, but we are not free from the effects of our transgressions. Married love has both a physical and a spiritual side. When we try to have one without the other, we are going against the plan God has made for our completion and happiness. It is he who has made us and not we ourselves. If we want to live life to its fullest we must do things his way, a way clearly outlined in the Bible.

The Bible most certainly condemns both adultery and fornication and says that they who commit these things will have no part in the kingdom of heaven. When God says “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not,” there is no room for rationalization. Today public opinion is more permissive of illicit unions and even of perversion than it has been since pagan times. Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. Yet the Christian rule is either marriage with complete faithfulness or total abstinence. Marriage is ordained of God and is thus a sacred institution of the Church. Therefore, a violation of the marriage vows is an enormous sin.

The greatest example of love the world has seen is our Lord Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us and who wants for each of his children a holy love that honors God and enriches man. I had a couple in my church years ago—and they are representative of many others everywhere—who, having just celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary, told me they were more in love then than ever before. This is what God wants for us all.

The second ingredient of a true marriage is maturity. This means keeping one’s eyes wide open before marriage and half shut afterward. In marriage counseling, problems fall into fairly well-established patterns. One familiar pattern is the marriage in which two people who are deeply in love cannot stand each other. They lack the maturity to live together in a relationship any more congenial than that of a cobra and a mongoose. They fight over every picayune detail; one gets angry and the other gets hurt. They cannot stand being together and they cannot stand being apart. He shows her that he is the boss by trying to smack a little sense into her, and she, to show him he cannot treat her that way, goes home to mother—and we know whose side her mother is going to take. It is the old story of each trying to teach the other a lesson.

After two sessions in which I talked to a young man and his wife separately, I brought them together in my office and had them retell their respective sides of the story. The problem was obvious, and since they wanted me to tell them what it was, I did. I told the husband, “You need to grow up and stop acting like a child every time you don’t get your own way.” To his wife I said, “My dear girl, you talk too much.” And she did. There was no big problem, just little things they lacked maturity to cope with. Physically they were adults; emotionally they were children, married four months but not ready for marriage. Man and wife are two people united in matrimony but with different goals and divergent viewpoints.

A divorce lawyer once said he was absolutely convinced that any two people who had made the wrong marriage could be reasonably happy if they had enough maturity really to try. That may be far from the ideal marriage; but when a man and woman stand before God and solemnly vow that they will take each other for better or for worse, may God help them if they do not mean it. What God has joined together, man by judicial decree cannot put asunder. The state may legalize divorce, but God says that marriage is for life, and it is he who will ultimately judge us.

Jesus permitted divorce and remarriage for only one reason—unfaithfulness—and even that is not always sufficient grounds. By the laws of many states, marriage is easily contracted and easily dissolved. Yet in the sight of Almighty God it is a lifetime contract that can be broken only by death or by unfaithfulness. The marriage vows are sacred, binding, irrevocable. This is the divine order, and we cannot change it without serious consequences.

Success in marriage comes not just from finding the “right person” but also from being the right person. Booth Tarkington has said that an ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband. The degree of success in marriage reflects the degree of maturity brought to it. “Incompatibility” and “mental cruelty” are usually just pseudonyms for immaturity.

Many young people rush into an ill-advised marriage for no other reason than that it seems to be the answer to their problem of insecurity or of unhappiness at home. This is why most ministers read in their introduction to the ceremony that matrimony is holy and is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, and in the fear of God. Where in heaven’s name did we get the idea that marriage is a refuge from an unhappy home life, a haven of security, or a bower of moonlight and roses?

Genuine love and personal maturity, then, are ingredients for a happy marriage. But for those who want to go beyond a happy marriage to a perfect marriage, there is a third ingredient. This is a person, Jesus Christ.

St. Augustine said: “Love God and then do whatever you wish,” because he who loves God will never do anything to hurt love. It is true that some marriages are made in heaven. Human love has reached its peak when it says: “I love you because God made you mine.”

The perfect marriage is a uniting of three: a man, a woman, and Christ. This is what makes matrimony holy. When a husband and wife pledge their lives each to the other and build their relationship solidly on spiritual principles, they create the greatest assurance of success and happiness possible. In 95 per cent of all divorces cases, either one or both partners did not attend church regularly. In regular church families, only one marriage in fifty-seven fails. And in families that worship God publicly in church and privately in the home, only one marriage in five hundred breaks up. It may be trite but it is nevertheless true that families who pray together stay together.

Those who look to Christ for guidance in choosing their marriage partner and who make Christ the head of their home will be blessed. Those who leave him out of their life and out of their marriage will be left to ways of their own choosing. One of the consistencies of human nature is that we are always wrong when we are not right with God. “Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it.” Jesus said, “Without me ye can do nothing.” He is the pilot who knows what is ahead—the narrow channels, the rocks and reefs where many lives have been wrecked. And he says; “If you will trust me, I will direct your life.”

What marriage is may be summed up in these lines from a wedding ceremony used by Peter Marshall:

“Dearly beloved, the marriage relation when rightly understood and properly appreciated is the most delightful as well as the most sacred and solemn of human relations. It is the clasping of hands, the blending of lives, and the union of hearts, that two may walk together up the hill of life to meet the dawn—together bearing life’s burdens, discharging its duties, sharing its joys and sorrows.

“Marriage is more than moonlight and roses, much more than the singing of love songs and the whispering of vows of undying affection. In our day it is by many lightly regarded, and by many as lightly discarded. But marriage will ever remain in the sight of God an eternal union, made possible only by the gift of love which God alone can bestow.”

The Wrong Corpse

With their fraternity mates, the beatniks, the confirmed secularists in the “God is dead” cult have plunged into the, depths of existential despair, romped about in the dark in their subsurface play-pens, and emerged to announce that “God is dead. He died in our time, in our history, in our existence.”

Who assassinated God? One is moved to ask whether they were sufficiently well acquainted with the Person pronounced dead to be able to identify the deceased.

What kind of “good news” is this? And what hope? Am I now to tell my son that the whole business is a fraud—that all these years I have been working for a “corpse” when I believed that the Jesus of history emerged from the tomb on Easter Day to become the living Christ of the Ages—and that in this vindicating and authenticating act of God there is “good news” for the race? The ages assure us that God doesn’t die by pronouncement, denial, or assassination—and already the “God is dead” cult is passé while it is aborning.—DR. EDWARD L. R. ELSON, in a sermon in the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C.

Disinterest in personal redemption and in private morality go hand in hand

The Gospel of Jesus Christ in its entirety, including the full spectrum of Christian morality, is the only hope for the world. But this is not what some clergymen are preaching. In many church circles morality is being ignored or fragmented, and social service is replacing the Gospel. Some churchmen are presenting as alternatives things between which there really is no choice. They distinguish between public and private morality, emphasizing the former while considering private morality unimportant and even superfluous. Others go further and demand no choice where a moral choice is imperative. The Master of St. Peter’s College, Oxford, had such persons in mind when he condemned the attitude of men who not only note that immorality is prevalent but also say that it is right.

The false alternatives of public and private morality are evident in a statement issued by Dr. John C. Bennett and other distinguished church leaders during the last Presidential election campaign. It is true that the primary purpose of the document was political. But now that its political implications have been swept away, the statement leaves us heir to some strange ethical conclusions. Dr. Bennett and his colleagues complained that during the campaign emphasis was placed on “a few episodes involving personal morality,” and that this emphasis was obscuring “the fateful moral issues related to public life” (the italics are mine). It is clear from the campaign issues that by “episodes involving personal morality” the churchmen meant the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker cases and the moral tragedy of hom*osexuality in the life of an important official. And by “the fateful moral issues related to public life” they meant civil rights, poverty, and nuclear war.

According to the statement, private morality in this context is a “distortion of morality”; but public morality is “fateful” and has great “implications.” Thus, public and private morality are considered to be separate; indeed, the implication seems to be that the two are at war. What the statement seems to say is: The public moral attitudes of private persons toward race, poverty, and war are important; but the private morality of public figures is not important—or at least none of our business.

The alternatives presented in this way are utterly false. The truth is that the fateful issues of the day will never be resolved by men of careless personal morality. Morality offers no choices marked “private” and “public.” It is not a question of either/or; it is vitally a question of both/and.

The confusion is compounded by the Reverend Howard Moody, whose article, “Toward a New Definition of Obscenity,” gains significance from its publication in Christianity and Crisis, a journal edited by Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett. Mr. Moody says: “For Christians the truly obscene ought not to be slick-paper nudity, nor the vulgarities of dirty old or young literati, nor even ‘wierdo’ films showing transvestite orgies or male genitalia. What is obscene is that material, whether sexual or not, that has as its basic motivation and purpose the … dehumanizing of persons. The dirtiest word in the English language is … the word ‘nigg*r’ from the sneering lips of a Bull Connor.… A picture is notc dirty that shows a man and woman in … intercourse.… The dirty or obscene is the one that shows the police dogs being unleashed on the Negro demonstrators in Birmingham” (Christianity and Crisis, January 25, 1965, p. 286). From these premises Mr. Moody goes on to attack those who attempt to bring obscenity under control.

Quite apart from the questionable semantics that allows Moody to define the brutalities of racial prejudice as obscenity, it is clear that for him obscenity as such is unimportant and that to fight it somehow detracts from the effort to right the terrible injustices suffered by American Negroes. Perhaps it was this fragmented sense of morality that led to the presentation in his church of a dance program in which, according to the New York Times, a nude man and woman moved across the platform.

We should like to applaud Mr. Moody’s passion for social justice. But how can we, when he leads us into false alternatives that are wholly unacceptable? A social revolution that does not accept the full spectrum of Christian morality will only lead from one confusion to another. It offers no sure path to the promised land but takes us instead in the opposite direction.

Protest is a powerful weapon of change. But it is a negative weapon. The Church’s main task is to create new life, not just to protest the old. Exponents of the “new morality” doubly ignore this when they attempt to combine legitimate social protests with a contradictory tolerance of pre-marital sex and of p*rnography on stage and screen and in literature.

In 1941 the British statesman Lord Salisbury said: “More than death, wounds and destruction I dread the moral desert that lies ahead.… This war is going to destroy the moral sense of nations. Values that it has taken generations to establish will be smashed. I do not mean the political and economic changes that are bound to come. They may be good for us all. I cannot say. But the smashing of absolute standards of morality that you and I believe in, the denial of truths of the spirit, the elevation of man’s mind and body in place of God—these are things out of which nothing but darkness and decay can come, and these are the things that I see before us” (quoted in Britain and the Beast, by Peter Howard).

It may be helpful to speculate on what lies behind the tendency of some in the Church to depreciate standards of personal morality. May it not mean that the Church is infected by the skepticism of our age? May not the difficulties of attaining personal moral standards breed doubt about the efficacy of grace? This is particularly true in relation to sex. If I will not live purely, I am led to rationalize impurity and to use my brain to kill my conscience. Finally, as a frustrated idealist, I turn from the proposition that I can live by grace to a program of social service that does not need grace. Instead of bringing the full power of the Gospel of Christ to bear upon the problems of society, I indulge in some more “up-to-date” expression of self-effort.

Thus, the real danger in the separation of private and public morality is that we may lose sight of a vital purpose of the Church. For the Church must create a new type of society emerging from a new type of man. This does not mean that the problems of race, color, poverty, and war must not be tackled vigorously and head on. It does mean, however, that such effort must never become a substitute for bringing men to that rebirth which puzzled Nicodemus and every pragmatist who followed him. This world needs what St. Paul spoke of, “If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation.” This new creation inevitably includes the fulfillment of personal morality. If we do not comprehend this, there is a very real possibility that the Church will become nothing more than a glorified social service agency.

Without some character-creating power at work in men, society may well become prey to a pervading legalism backed by physical force. For example, racial integration depends for its true success on men’s freely choosing to associate with one another. Without the creation of new motivation in individuals, it will be left to the state to originate and enforce each social development.

This is evident in President Johnson’s Great Society program. The Civil Rights Law of 1964 had been in effect less than a year when Congress had to enact new legislation to enforce the right of Negroes to vote. No one can complain if the state, in the absence of an unselfish spirit of responsibility and a virile sense of social justice on the part of its citizens, adopts laws that reflect Christian principles. To do so is its right and duty. But this does not alter the fact that the state is thus compelled to intrude into what should be areas of free and private choice. It is never a healthy thing when the state has to enforce what should be a Christian action springing from personal attitudes of brotherhood and responsibility. At bottom, integration is a matter, not of color, but of character, and character is a concern of the Church. Yet intervention by the state becomes almost inevitable if the Church fails in its unique work of creating under God the distinctive type of man who is called a Christian.

We have a threefold choice in this matter: a chaotic conflict between black and white, a pervading legalism enforced by the state, or the creation of a new type of man whose inner qualities cause him to do what he should. We are reminded of William Penn’s statement: “Men must choose to be governed by God or they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants.”

These are the areas in which the Church incurs the risk of running not only into theological and ethical inconsistencies but also into ideological ones. A basic tenet of Marxism is that human nature is incorrigible but by force can be made to conform to a new environment. Such a philosophy inevitably accompanies atheism, because apart from God human nature is indeed incorrigible, as Scripture so plainly teaches. And atheism makes materialism inevitable.

It would be tragically ironic if the Church, because of an unrecognized atheistic skepticism about God’s power to bring about full personal morality by transforming human nature and creating a new man, were to fall into the same ideological error as Communism and attempt to transform man by altering his environment.

If anyone is tempted to think the Communist way is best, let him ponder the decades of Communist experimentation in Russia. After nearly half a century of cataclysmic changing of the environment, the Soviet authorities are having to shoot robbers and rapists; their plans are frustrated by corruption, and they do not know how to control their youth. Admittedly, the West has much the same problems; but this does not make less significant the fact that Khrushchev, before his decline from power, was reported to be wondering how to produce a new type of man that could make his revolution succeed. And it is at least arguable that Communism may be reaching the end of a cycle and may be ripe for the Christian truth of personal redemption rejected at the beginning of the Marxist revolution.

If this is so, the Church may have its one chance to work for the conversion of Peking and Moscow. It would be tragic indeed if all we had to offer were the outmoded materialism that the Communist leaders may now be discarding as wrong and inadequate.

The obituary column is hardly the place where the newspaper reader expects to find the name of God. Yet a group of thinkers whose views have lately been reported by the press are spreading the news that “God is dead.” Now, God can take care of himself without our help. He will survive this attack as he has survived all others. Yet many people are concerned about this death-of-God view, and it would be well to consider its implications.

The denial of God is not at all new. In April, 1822, the French philosopher Auguste Comte presented a paper in which he outlined three stages through which all knowledge has to pass: (1) the theological or fictitious stage; (2) the metaphysical or abstract stage; and (3) the scientific or positive stage. As man moves from the theological level to the scientific stage, he puts away childish and superficial beliefs and comes to a true scientific understanding. Applying this thinking to the history of man’s ideas, Comte even sought to develop a kind of positivistic religion. On April 22, 1851, he predicted, “I am convinced that before the year 1860 I shall be preaching positivism in Notre Dame as the only real and complete religion.” He did not quite make it to the cathedral, but his spiritual descendants are teaching and preaching it in other high places.

Comtian positivism has seeped into the thinking of modern man. Many people now say that belief in God and the Church gradually abates, belief in man and his powers increases, and humanity written large takes the place of Christianity. Many who have such ideas do not understand the source of the attitude toward life to which they subscribe.

Karl Marx was another who sought to deny God. In saying that “religion is the opiate of the people,” he had much in common with Comte. Religion, he said, belongs to the realm of the mythological and the superstitious. It is an evil that stands in the way of change for the better. Thoroughgoing Communism is committed to the destruction of the Christian faith and the spread of atheism.

Sigmund Freud also attacked the idea of God and the Christian faith. In a little book called “The Future of an Illusion,” he wrote that religion is a kind of self-perpetuating group illusion for the maintaining of certain values and certain customs. When freed of religion and the inhibitions it imposes, a man has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

Among others who try to deny God are the atheistic existentialists. There are two kinds of existentialists, one of them atheistic. Among those in this group are Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger. Camus, in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” describes the condition of man caught up in a meaningless struggle with no choice but to keep struggling. Sisyphus, you remember, was doomed to roll the rock laboriously up the hill; just when it gets to the top it rolls down and he has to start all over again. The only solution is to fall in love with his rock. As for Sartre and Heidegger, both brilliant writers, they are both atheistic.

Even the expression “God is dead” is not new; it was first used by Nietzsche, in the nineteenth century. Yet now we are seeing something else. We are seeing the spectacle of men who want to hold on to the word “Christian” but who are proclaiming baldly the death of God.

Thomas Hardy once wrote a poem called “The Funeral of God”:

I saw a slowly stepping train

Lines on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar,

Following in files across a twilit plain;

A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

O man-projected figure, of late

Imaged as we, thy knell who shall arrive?

Whence came it we were tempted to create

One whom we can no longer keep alive?

How sweet it was in the years far hied

To start the, wheels of day with trustful prayer!

To lie down liegely at the eventide

And feel a blest assurance He was there.

Hardy considers God to be dead, but he is wistful and sad about it. The modern thinkers about whom we have been hearing proclaim boldly and even gladly that God is dead. They do not mean that God is unreal to people, or that the word “God” has lost its meaning; they mean that God is actually dead. This assertion is coupled with a lack of faith in the Church. One of the leaders of the movement has said, “God is dead, and the Church is his tombstone.”

Now, over against the point of view of these thinkers, let us examine Matthew 16:13–18, which has to do with an incident in the life of Christ. When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” They answered, “Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.” Then Jesus said, “But whom say ye that I am?” In reply Peter said, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus then said, “Blessed art thou, Simon, Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Three main ideas from this passage may be set over against the death-of-God thought. First, let us note these words of Christ to Peter: “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” Revelation is the basis of our faith. We believe, not what finite man has been able to find out about an infinite God, but what an infinite God in his mercy and love has revealed to us of himself in the “Word” that he has spoken unto us.

The Word of God is the authority to which we turn, the objective criterion standing over us. If our faith were merely a matter of what you believe or what I believe, then the whole matter would be subjective and would have no norm. But it is not. Faith is not something aimed at God as a sort of dimension of our own experience; it is something elicited in us by the Word of God.

Why is the Bible at the center of our churches? Why do we study it in our various church groups? Because in it we find the Word by which we are continually judged, and through which we find life by the Spirit.

Secondly, let us note these words of our Lord. “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The Church is certainly not above criticism. How could it be when it is made up of people like you and me? Indeed, it is one of the easiest institutions to criticize. But through the years the Church has been able to absorb criticism and learn from it, and to move out in new ways.

At the same time, let us remember something else. The Church has been called into existence by God himself through Jesus Christ. As the Scripture reminds us, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” We say in our ritual, “The Church is of God and will be preserved until the end of time.” The Church has tremendous survival power. It is here to stay.

Thirdly, let us notice the words Peter addressed to Jesus, words which Jesus approved: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” They tie Jesus and God together. The “God is dead” people want to get rid of God while retaining Jesus. This is not only religiously wrong but also theologically dishonest. It tries to bypass a problem with an aphorism. It is impossible to hold on to the historical Jesus without God, because “Jesus without Jesus’ heavenly Father is not Jesus.” Peter’s confession is, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Let us consider their appeal for the historical Jesus. Joachim Jeremias, in his book The Central Message of the New Testament, deals with the word “Abba.” He contends that Jesus, in applying the word to God, introduced something new into the world. Here, he says, we have gone behind the kerygma to the historical Jesus himself. And what do we find? We find the Son in constant and living dependence upon the Father.

Jesus and the living God go together. There is no such thing as a Jesus-gospel. The Gospel is the news of the redemptive working of God in Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul puts it, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.”

Pascal, in his struggle for religious reality, finally came to a point when his life was changed and a new dimension of reality came alive for him. He later wrote a description of his experience that he wore next to his body. In this description were the words: “Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.…” That experience had become the great focal point of his life.

Above all else is the living God, whose loving heart is seen in his Son Jesus Christ, in whom and through whom there is life eternal.

The chaplain’s congregation is a cross section of American life

Many a new military chaplain expecting a special welcome at a gathering of his fellow clergymen faces disappointment. For, although he has found the chaplaincy to be one of the finest ministries available, one that affords wonderful opportunities to reach men for Christ, he soon learns that many civilian pastors do not view it this way. Unfortunately, we chaplains are often viewed as eccentrics who abandon the ministerial brotherhood and denominational duties to roam the world on a kind of quasi-religious business. Some see us as irresponsible and devil-may-care, supported by taxes and church offerings but not doing enough to deserve either. Instead of spending our time jumping out of airplanes, camping out, sailing around the world at government expense, and flying in helicopters, they say, why not settle down to the serious business of parish work!

Chaplains should not blame their civilian brethren for their feelings, however; they simply do not understand. The common attitude was summed up by a district superintendent who said to me the first time I returned for an annual conference, “Paul, I know you’ve wanted to become a chaplain ever since you first started preaching, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why!” Well, for fellow ministers who might like to join the chaplains’ ranks and also for those who view chaplains as a ministerial version of the “beat generation,” some explanation is in order.

Chaplains are not trying to escape administrative responsibilities. They have their paper work, too. They are certainly not gaining autonomy by wriggling out from under denominational boards or bishops. Chaplains are part of the military structure of rank. At least civilian clergy don’t have to salute when they report to the bishop! Nor are chaplains seeking to avoid such pastoral duties as weddings, baptisms, funerals, or hospital calls; nearly every chaplain is called upon to perform all these. Even the responsibility for church growth is not lacking. On Easter Sunday, 1964, for instance, three Methodist chaplains at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, baptized twenty-two and took thirty-seven into the church.

No, one does not become a chaplain to avoid pastoral duties, for wherever he is and whatever unit he serves, he is first, last, and always a pastor. He may make his pastoral calls on a group of soldiers on maneuvers sitting in muddy foxholes, or he may serve communion to three hundred people in a beautiful base chapel. He may visit men in the stockade or brig or in the hospital, or call on proud parents in their home as they prepare to have their baby baptized. He may find himself working on a large post with a dozen or more other chaplains of all denominations, or he may be all alone—perhaps in a helicopter, hopping from radar site to radar site across northern Canada, perhaps at sea on an aircraft carrier. Wherever he is, he will see men, be involved with men and their problems—ill-fitting clothes, pregnant girlfriends, lack of money, homesickness, sunstroke, “hate-the-service-itis,” unfaithful wives, ill-tempered first sergeants, drunkenness, traffic tickets. He will be shown letters beginning: “Dear Tommy, I hate to tell you this, but you see, there is this boy …”; or “Dear Chaplain, My son hasn’t written me for six months …”; or “Dear Sir: I’ve changed my mind and want my Billy back home now.…” He may be asked questions about sociology, psychology, zoology, pathology, mythology, Christology, eschatology, Catholicism, Judaism, Lutheranism, Communism, politics, the theater, art, or sex.

To sum up, the business of chaplains is people. Their congregations are cross sections of life in America. In them are big-league ball players, concert musicians, and peanut vendors, from privates to generals. Among them are saints and sinners, and they all need Christ.

A large percentage of those to whom chaplains minister are in that eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old group where the Church is losing out. By the time young people reach the end of high school, they are asking a lot of questions. Many, feeling that the Church does not give answers that satisfy them, leave its fellowship, or at least its influence. For an average period of six years they wander, search, and experiment with life. And when they feel that they have found the answers, they settle down. Often they begin to understand the values of the Church and Christian fellowship, and they return. Sometimes they do not. Whatever the outcome, young men are very likely to spend some part of these searching years in the armed services. And there are a multitude of forces in and around the military community that seek to lead them further away from Christ and his Church. If there were no chaplains to help to counteract these influences, far fewer young men would return to the Church than now do.

Chaplains do have an important job, not only in ministering to the physical, mental, social, and spiritual problems of their men, but also in preparing them for their return to civilian life and their home churches. For this reason chaplains feel it vital to work as closely as possible with their fellow clergymen at home. Those in the home church have to understand the problems of a lonely G.I. in order to realize how much a church letter, a Sunday bulletin, or even just a card at Christmas means to him. Congregations must see that, although the man in the service has his chaplain, he still needs the care and concern of the shepherd at home. Churches must not abandon their servicemen. They must show them concern. And when they do so, they find their servicemen coming back to the fellowship of the Church.

“The ministers of recent fiction are the groping, fallible, doubting men …”

During the twentieth century the image of the clergyman in fiction has changed. Once seen as a crusader, he has now become a doubter. Once a comforter, he is now an accommodator. His problems have changed from external ones involving society at large to internal conflicts of values and belief.

In his wide-ranging study entitled The Failure of Theology in Modern Literature, John Killinger observes that the clergy, “far from standing like lonely figures in the ship’s prow, have tended to be found in far greater abundance on the poop deck.” And perhaps to a certain extent—in The Mackerel Plaza, for example, or earlier on an even more crass level in Elmer Gantry—his caricature has been valid. Further, such debunking extends to Casey in The Grapes of Wrath and to Brush in Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination.

Several recent works have broadened this view. While they have not attempted to restore the minister to the prow supposedly commanded by his Victorian grandfather—that would be artistically dishonest—at least they portray him as a fighting man. Yet it is an inner anguish rather than an outside secular force that drives him so hard. He suffers everything from doubt and self-delusion to constipation and spinal decay, and he is never sure enough of his own position to be able to lead anyone else to glory along the paths of righteousness. Tension, not triumph, is his hallmark.

Struggling, yet also soiled, neurotic, and ultimately ineffective—this is the way modern authors tend to portray the man of the cloth. There are exceptions, of course, such as formula stories like The Stained Glass Jungle, sentimental novels like In His Steps, and the products of Roman Catholic novelists like Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor. But the following four books—three novels and a play—may be considered representative of the trend of dozens of portraits of the clerical character.

Holy Masquerade portrays a pastor who is obviously contemporary. His problems are set in the world that surrounds us all. The Spire reveals a cathedral dean whose conflicts are current though his disguise is medieval. Symbolized in his struggle is the unending battle within man’s own nature. Luther interprets a real historical character through the psychological point of view of the twentieth century. The distance between the monk of Reformation history and the man of the Broadway play is a good gauge of how far the clergyman has come in the fiction of the last several generations. And The Last Temptation of Christ gives us “the ultimate clergyman” in the person of Jesus himself, again as viewed through the screen of a modern consciousness that cannot endorse orthodoxy as the answer to the problem of belief. In all four cases the “minister” is shaped out of the clay of daily life and revealed as a man like other men.

The center of their common problem lies in the question that Klara Svenson, wife of a Swedish pastor, presses on her indecisive husband in the moving but little-known Holy Masquerade (for an excerpt from this book, see the December 3 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY). “Would you be different,” she asks, “if you were not a Christian?” Instead of answering, he argues that this is “not relevant” to their theological argument (“but his face got red and he spilled ashes on the floor”), and he counterattacks by charging her with having the sort of romantic nature that refuses to confront the moral ambiguities of modern life. We soon learn, though, that even with all the jargon-studded intellectual skirmishes he stumbles through, his own brand of Christianity never approaches the power and excitement of the New Testament Church, and that in its failure to be relevant to his own experience it has thrown him into the organizational whirlpool whose end is spiritual and moral annihilation.

Olov Hartman’s indictment here follows a trail that was blazed many years ago and is now well worn. Earlier writers have often portrayed the clergy as “businessmen with apostolic credentials” like Albert, who is more devoted to preparing records for “the Central Statistical Bureau” than to praying with a dying woman afraid to face the prospects of hell. And the guilt of pulpit politics that makes our ministers “veer in the opposite direction” when they “feel heat” has similarly become an all-too-familiar tale.

As we read the jottings of Klara’s Lenten diary, we feel a fresh anguish with one yearning to see the Word made flesh, asking the Church to give her something “to believe in or doubt in”—but at least something definite. But the only answer the compromising Albert can show her is his own hypocrisy as an “ordinary” man having “to live and teach like a spiritually minded person.” He hasn’t even the vigorous honesty of Eccles, the minister in John Updike’s Rabbit Run, who with all of his doubts is still on a valid search and “wants to be told … that he’s not lying to all those people every Sunday.”

Mirrored in the deterioration of the Svensons’ marriage as well as in Klara’s mind is what she calls the schizophrenia of the Church—its holy masquerade. Neither cold nor hot, its nominal sort of Christianity is an odd mixture of sacred trappings over a secular base. And it offers no one any assurance, since “first there must be clarity; otherwise comfort is of no avail.”

In the “theological fog” that obscures Pastor Svenson’s life and spreads to envelop his entire rural parish, Christianity is ineffective because it is hollow. Doubt has replaced faith in the minister’s study and cold form has replaced holy fire in the sanctuary. It is ironic that the only time the church becomes “fired up,” the entire empty structure is reduced to ashes.

Less modern in its setting but more inclusive in the force of its theme is William Golding’s The Spire. None of his five novels has drawn a specific portrait of our times; yet like each one before it, this latest work reveals unavoidable moral implications for its characters. In it Golding turns to a cathedral in medieval England (the town is historically Salisbury) whose dean, an intricately developed character named Jocelin, has seen a vision: he must erect a four-hundred foot spire atop his church as a visible monument to God, “since the children of men require a thing to look at.”

In spite of the uncertain footing below, little by little the spire climbs. Yet not all is being done to the glory of God. On the contrary, the rising tower destroys immeasurably more than it creates. From the very beginning the services of the church are disrupted by dust and dirt and the profanity of the workmen, until finally they are discontinued entirely. In place of worship comes chaos: the disintegration of an old friendship between Jocelin and his confessor, the horrors of violent death, the profaning of the cathedral halls into a house of adultery. “Only the alehouses prospered.”

True, the growing spire seems for a time to be achieving some good. If nothing else, it is a visible signpost whose presence changes the wagon routes men have taken across the hills for generations in their trips to town. Yet it never really penetrates deeply enough to straighten the paths of any of their lives, and at best its benefits are superficial. It is simply “Jocelin’s folly.”

Ever upward, meanwhile, climbs the needle of the spire until finally it reaches its peak. It sways in the winds of the storms and makes the pillars supporting it bend and “sing” with its weight—but it stands. Yet by the end of the novel even Jocelin, by this time physically broken and mentally delirious, expects it to crash down at any moment to destroy the church and all that lies in its shadow. With difficulty he asks, “Fallen?” and the answer comes back quietly, “Not yet.”

It might have seemed better if the spire had fallen, for then at least there would have been the finality of a fruitless vision. Hartman, for example, gives us a church in ruins as poetic justice for its pastor’s failings. But Golding leaves us instead with a monument to destruction—a destruction all the more poignant because we have participated in its development. We have climbed the tower ladders with the hod-carriers and wiped the dust from our eyes and faces. We have doubted with the builders and hoped with Jocelin. But ultimately we have seen our faith dried up. We have seen that the dean himself—even more than his church—was without any real supporting foundation. Observing the human ruin that accompanies his grand vision, we question the divinity of his inspiration and agree ruefully as he confesses, “I injure everyone I touch, particularly those I love.”

Man is depraved; this has been Golding’s recurring thesis ever since Lord of the Flies. But where does such a person turn? The Church has all the evils of men, including in its clergy an inordinately huge measure of pride. (One is reminded, too, that those who fall into savagery in his earliest novel are choirboys.) “Say what you like; he’s proud,” remarks one of the deacons about Jocelin. “And ignorant,” adds another. But “he thinks he is a saint!” This is his predicament and the theme of the novel. The corrosive pride of a man who begins by thinking he is doing God’s work culminates in the ruin of himself and those about him. Early in the book he says, “I am about my Father’s business,” and Golding writes that in the closing moment “the final tremor of his lips … might be interpreted as a cry of God! God! God!” But there is no record in the text that he ever receives any reply of assurance before he dies, a broken spirit.

Still more provocative, and more compelling as a literary work, is John Osborne’s brilliant drama Luther. There is no fable here; the man on the stage is real, his agonizing unmistakable. But the Luther of the play is far removed from the Dr. Luther who influenced more people across Europe than any other modern man except perhaps Karl Marx.

Without apology, history has been distorted. Yet Osborne’s Luther is not an ideal to be worshiped by Protestants, not an abstract to be studied by Catholics, not just a name to be remembered by historians. Instead he is a genius who is never sure of himself, a man tormented and tortured, often wracked with physical pain, more than slightly neurotic, and always bothered by extreme constipation. True, he is courageous and brilliant, but he reveals neither nobility nor grace. Nor certainty.

Acts I and II move from the noisy showmanship of Tetzel’s sale of indulgences (“I can even pardon you for sins you haven’t committed, but which, however, you intend to commit!”) to Luther’s savage ridicule of fake relics (“empty things for empty men”). And there is the strong scene at the Diet of Worms where Luther makes his famous speech: “I cannot and will not recant.… Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more. Amen.”

But the concluding and disquieting focus of the play shifts away from the fiery Luther in his pulpit to the tender and domestic Luther in his home. He is no longer the man who defied kings and popes. The first clash of the Reformation is over and a new Germany has been created. But inside him there is no change; nothing has been resolved. Luther is still uncertain, and in a scene where an old friend asks him, “Were you sure?” he answers, weakly, “No.”

In the final lines he is talking of heaven to his young son and reading the promises of the New Testament. Yet the best he can say—and on this note the curtain falls—is, “Let’s just hope so.…” There is hope, but even for Martin Luther, the great catalyst of reformation, there is no final certainty. Nor was there any for Jocelin, dean of an English cathedral, or for Albert, pastor of a Swedish church.

Listen to the music the orchestra has been playing. “Ein’ feste Burg.…” How false the words sound after seeing the doubts of their actor-author. “God’s truth abideth still.…” Perhaps for the hymnwriter in 1529, but not for the contemporary Luther on a New York stage. “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.…” Almost an epitaph for Jocelin. “And He must win the battle.…” Well, maybe in sixteenth-century Germany, but not today.

In three works we have seen torment unresolved and Christianity ineffective. Each clergyman, unable to sink the taproot of his own faith, is unable to meet the needs of others. Svenson destroys a marriage and ignores a congregation. Jocelin defiles a church to build his dreams in discord and distress. And Luther cannot offer even his small child more than an uncertain hope. Supernaturalism is gone, and in its place is an earthbound tragic struggle for God.

It is against such a background that we now see Jesus, the man of Nazareth. Far from the description of the Scriptures and even farther from the pious image that he has sometimes been given, Kazantzakis’s Jesus knows the fires of lust and the chokings of doubt. “I am wrestling,” the youthful carpenter cries out. He is compelled by temptations—to be a man like other men, to withdraw into spiritual isolation, “to settle down to a life of happiness with his beloved Mary Magdalene,” to abandon his struggle with God. There is grandeur in his battle between flesh and spirit, and his representation of the human predicament is vivid and intense. But it is not so easy to say he is sacred or a part of the Godhead.

Such a portrait is, clearly enough, a heresy to the orthodox, who have opposed it as “blasphemous” and “a mass of monstrous distortions.” Yet the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ is at least in part the victor where each of the men considered before has been a failure. The reasons are simple and direct: Jesus took the long road all the way to the Cross; the others stopped short. Jesus conquered his doubts; the others yielded to theirs, or were consumed by them, or were blocked by them.

Kazantzakis explains that he wrote this book “because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles. I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation, or death—because all three can be conquered; all three have been conquered.” Yet these very same words help to explain why such a Jesus has not satisfied the struggle of those clergymen whom we have already seen. As the novelist himself points out, this Jesus is “a model who blazes our trail,” not the saving Christ. He cannot offer the promise of abundant life to any who would call themselves Christian, since in his final act he loses his own life. For though he dies on the Cross “because he loves the whole world,” we come to the end of the last page before the Resurrection is reached. We are left viewing a dead man instead of a risen Lord.

“Behold, old things have passed away and all things are become new,” says the New Testament text. And so it is with the fictional ministers of the Church. The old faith in a supernatural and redemptive Saviour is gone, and with it the dogmatic certainty and the old victory. In place of the affirmation of the past, however, is a struggle to find a new validity and a contemporary relevance in the example of the man who said, “I am the way.… Follow me.”

The ministers of recent fiction are the groping, fallible, doubting men of the twentieth century—men in the midst of the modern predicament. Their problems are those of an age of secularism and science that seeks a new Reformation on its own terms. Thus far, however, their search has not been very successful. They continue on as divines in doubt.

Three items clamor for mention in this privileged precinct, and no one is more aware than I of their lack of logical connection. But then, after all, this brief foreword is no homiletical exercise.

First, congratulations to our British editorial director, Dr. J. D. Douglas, who adds to his duties the editorship of the century-old evangelical news magazine The Christian. Illness, which resulted in death, prevented Tom Allan from filling that responsible role. CHRISTIANITY TODAY is glad to share Dr. Douglas’s penetrating mind and gifted pen for this new assignment.

Next, a word about Christmas cards. At this moment of writing, it seems that those on our expansive list of personal friends are unlikely to receive the customary Yuletide greeting. Some weeks ago the cards were bought and stored out of sight for Thanksgiving addressing. But four or five basem*nt-to-bedroom searches have uncovered no trace of them. One card per friend I defend as an indispensable remembrance, but two—never. Let friendship take the will for the deed rather than commercialism strain the budget for a counterpart. If the cards emerge (suggestions will be welcome) before the Fourth of July, we’ll add a “here it is” postscript in bright red ink. Meanwhile, a joyous Christmas to our readers, one and all.

Finally, about the next issue. To hold to our annual quota of twenty-five issues, the next copies of CHRISTIANITY TODAY will be printed three weeks hence and dated January 7, 1966 (rather than December 31, 1965). If the postman shows up earlier than that, you will know he’s carrying a counterfeit copy. Insist on the real thing.

Some american visitors to Europe return home with sad accounts of gastric disturbances, while others seem to thrive on unfamiliar cuisine. But hardly a single Christian traveler on the Continent or in Great Britain comes home unshaken by the low church attendance in virtually all European countries. My wife and I were saddened by this phenomenon during our year in the great Reformation city of Strasbourg; as we participated in the ancient liturgy and were blessed by the Christocentric messages delivered at the Lutheran Eglise St. Thomas—whose history stretches back to the ninth century—we sometimes found ourselves among only fifty or seventy-five worshipers.

Why this pitiful stale of affairs? Recently a French sociologist has gone to work on the problem, and his far from tautological conclusions warrant careful consideration by the theological community. The sociologist is Professor François-G. Dreyfus of the Faculty of Letters and the Institute of Political Science at the University of Strasbourg, and his analysis of church decline is summarized in an article titled, “Secularization in Alsatian Protestantism Since the Nineteenth Century,” appearing in the latest issue of the Revue d’Histoire el de Philosophie Religieuses (Vol. 45, No. 2).

Dreyfus begins with a careful presentation of the church situation in the Alsace. In spite of general population increases from 1800 to the present, and in spite of the enlargement of Roman Catholic communicant membership, Alsatian Protestantism has shown no appreciable growth: there were 210,000 Protestants in 1820,247,000 in 1871 (when, as a result of the Franco-Prussian War, the Alsace was annexed to Germany), and only 242,000 in 1954.

These statistical phenomena pose a genuine interpretative challenge, and Dreyfus reaches solid ground by analyzing an invaluable survey of Alsatian church life carried out in 1851 by the Lutheran state church. The replies to the questionnaires are still preserved in the National Archives, and they give minute data on the condition of the parishes—data that frequently reveal far more than the pastors or laity of the time could have imagined.

Typical, for example, are the comments of the pastors at Colmar and at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines: “With some honorable exceptions, the poor class is too demanding, not sufficiently grateful, crude, and for the most part drunk and lazy.” “The working class constitutes the majority of the Protestant parish, and on the whole it lacks industriousness. But, happily, we also have a solid bourgeoisie which is the pillar of the church.”

From such clear and striking comments as these, Dreyfus soundly concludes that one of the major reasons for the decline of Alsatian Protestantism in modern times has been the indifference of the Church to the industrial revolution and to the working classes that arose as part of that great social movement. Just as during the Old Regime the Roman church lost its influence over the great mass of French Catholics by identifying with the rank and privileges of the nobility, so during the urban-industrial revolution of the last century and a half, Protestant Christianity has made the equally tragic mistake of identifying with the status quo. Ignoring “the signs of the times,” it has pharisaically passed by on the other side when vast numbers of people have desperately needed its ministrations.

But important as was this social factor, another consideration had an even greater part in the decline of Alsatian Protestantism. States Dreyfus: “We must underscore the very great role played by Protestant thought itself,” specifically the impact of “rationalism,” “liberalism,” and “latitudinarianism of doctrine”—and “it seems clear that this considerable influence enjoyed by liberalism is not peculiar to Protestant Alsace; one encounters it in most of the Protestant regions of Europe.” Illustrating from questionnaire data and from other primary sources, Dreyfus shows that (in the words of a Pfaffenhoffen pastor), “from the middle of the eighteenth century, the Protestant church seems to have slept; it appears to have forgotten the confessional writings upon which its pastors took their ordination vows.”

By 1860, the majority of the professors on the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Strasbourg had become liberals, and (as is the invariable pattern) the decline then began in earnest. Typical of the church situation was Pastor Nied’s beginning-of-term address for the Protestant Seminary in 1868; his subject was “Preparation for the Holy Ministry,” and not once does the name of Jesus appear in it. Dreyfus notes that where German rationalistic theology had the most influence, the Alsatian church suffered most. Today, in the wake of two world wars, there is little unreconstructed liberalism left in the Alsace, and the Protestant Theological Faculty is again confessionally Lutheran; but the damage has been done, and the common man in the Alsace, hostile to religion without knowing why, is the chief victim.

Though Dreyfus’s study of church decline is limited to the Alsace, the wider significance of his investigation can hardly be missed. Observation of the Church in the modern era—whether on the European continent or in England or in the United States—would seem to elevate Dreyfus’s two causal explanations for Alsatian church decline to the level of ecclesiological laws: doctrinal liberalism and social conservatism are two best ways to insure the secularization of the Church.

In our own land, what has been the effect of our middle-class, white-only churches, striving to delay social progress and to ignore the existence of great masses of people? The result has been that social progress has come anyway, spearheaded by those who do not represent evangelical Christendom, and untold numbers in minority groups have been permanently alienated from the historic Gospel. The unregenerate man has an instinctive ability to identify bad trees by their bad fruit.

And what has been the result of the weakening of biblical and doctrinal authority in U. S. churches? Indifference on the part of the unbeliever to the Church’s appeals. It is not for nothing that the most theologically conservative Protestant bodies (e.g., the Southern Baptists and the Missouri Lutherans) have been the most energetic and have had the greatest growth rates—nor that Unitarian seminaries hobble along from year to year heavily endowed but virtually empty. Unregenerate man also knows instinctively that liberal religion is man-made and therefore incapable of rising from puerile good advice to transcendental Good News.

Want to arrest the secularization of the Church? Try an unqualified biblical message, directed to all those for whom the Lord of glory died.

Chapter One of the Westminster Confession

1. ALTHOUGH the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable.¹Ps. 19:1–4. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun. Rom. 1:32. Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. Rom. 2:1. Therefore thou art inexcusable. O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. Rom. 1:19, 20. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. See Rom. 2:14, 15. yet they are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and of his will which is necessary unto salvation;²1 Cor. 1:21. For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. 1 Cor. 2:13, 14. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth. but which the Holy Ghost teacheth: comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his Church;³Heb. 1:1, 2. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son. and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing:⁴Luke 1:3, 4. It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed. Rom. 15:4. For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. Matt. 4:4, 7, 10. But he answered and said. It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Isa. 8:20. To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary,⁵2 Tim. 3:15. And that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 2 Peter 1:19. We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts. those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.⁶Heb. 1:1, 2. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners-spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.

2. Under the name of Holy Scripture, or the Word of God written, are now contained all the books of the Old and New Testaments, which are these:

OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Genesis

Ecclesiastes

Exodus

The Song of Songs

Leviticus

Isaiah

Numbers

Jeremiah

Deuteronomy

Lamentations

Joshua

Ezekiel

Judges

Daniel

Ruth

Hosea

I Samuel

Joel

II Samuel

Amos

I Kings

Obadiah

II Kings

Jonah

I Chronicles

Micah

II Chronicles

Nahum

Ezra

Habakkuk

Nehemiah

Zephaniah

Esther

Haggai

Job

Zechariah

Psalms

Malachi

Proverbs

OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

The Gospels

According to

Matthew

Mark

Luke

John

The Acts of the

Apostles

Paul’s Epistles:

Romans

I Corinthians

II Corinthians

Galatians

Ephesians

Philippians

Colossians

I Thessalonians

II Thessalonians

I Timothy

II Timothy

Titus

Philemon

The Epistle

to the Hebrews

The Epistle of James

The First and Second

Epistles of Peter

The First, Second,

and Third Epistles

of John

The Epistle of Jude

The Revelation

All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.⁷Epb. 2:20. And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.Rev. 22:18, 19. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things. God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. 2 Tim. 3:16. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Matt. 11:27. Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

3. The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture: and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.⁸Luke 24:27, 44. And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. And he said unto them. These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. Rom. 3:2. Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God. 2 Pet. 1:21. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

4. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.⁹2 Tim. 3:16. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. 1 John 5:9. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son. 1 Thess. 2:13. For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but, as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.

5. We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture;¹⁰1 Tim. 3:15. But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God; yet, notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.¹¹1 John 2:20, 27. But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him. John 16:13, 14. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will show you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. 1 Cor. 2:10–12. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

6. The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is cither expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men.¹²2 Tim. 3:15–17. And that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Gal. 1:8. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. 2 Thess. 2:2. That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Nevertheless we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word;¹³John 6:45. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me. 1 Cor. 2:9, 10, 12. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. and there are some circ*mstances concerning the worship of God and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed.¹⁴1 Cor. 11:13, 14. Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered? Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? 1 Cor. 14:26, 40. How is it then, brethren? when ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, bath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying. Let all things be done decently and in order.

7. All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor like clear unto all;¹⁵2 Peter 3:16. As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things: in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction. yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other that not only the learned but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.¹⁶Ps. 119:105, 130. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. See Acts 17:11.

8. The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical;¹⁷Matt. 5:18. For verily I say unto you. Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.so as in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal unto them.¹⁸Isa. 8:20. To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. Acts 15:15. And to this agree the words of the prophets. John 5:46. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God who have right unto and interest in the Scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read and search them,¹⁹2 Tim. 3:14, 15. But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Acts 17:11. These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so. therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come,²⁰1 Cor. 14:6, 9, 11, 12, 24, 27, 28. Now, brethren, if I come unto you speaking with tongues, what shall I profit you, except I shall speak to you either by revelation, or by knowledge, or by prophesying, or by doctrine? So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, bow shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice. I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me. Even so ye. forasmuch as ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may excel to the edifying of the church. But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all. If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course: and let one interpret. But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God. that, the Word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner,²¹Col. 3:16. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. and, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, may have hope.²²Rom. 15:4. For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.

9. The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it may be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.²³Acts 15:15. And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written. John 5:46. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. See 2 Peter 1:20, 21.

10. The Supreme Judge, by whom all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.²⁴Matt. 22:29, 31. Jesus answered and said unto them. Ye do err. not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God? Acts 28:25. And when they agreed not among themselves, they departed, after that Paul had spoken one word. Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto our fathers. Gal. 1:10. For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men. I should not be the servant of Christ. See 1 John 4:1–6.

What if the nation’s 3,300,000 United Presbyterians were suddenly asked to sign a statement equating the Bible directly with the Word of God?

An overwhelming majority, including many who are theologically inarticulate, would probably subscribe without mental reservation. But the dissident minority includes a literate bloc of clergymen who control denominational headquarters in Philadelphia’s venerable Witherspoon Building. And from that ecclesiastically strategic vantage point the biblical critics are plumping a Barthian yet pragmatically oriented “Confession of 1967.”

Fearing that the new document will supplant the principle of scriptural integrity championed by the time-honored Westminster Confession, evangelicals in United Presbyterian churches throughout the country are discreetly rallying their forces to do battle. The outcome is expected to have wide significance inasmuch as Presbyterian thinkers have traditionally been leaders of evangelical theology in North America (see editorial, page 30).

United Presbyterian conservatives arranged an impressive show of strength at a special two-day conference in Chicago last month. Staged by a new organization known as Presbyterians United for Biblical Confession, the conference sought to coordinate efforts of the thousands of evangelical clergymen seeking to preserve the heritage of the United Presbyterian Church. The group’s key effort to date has been an incisive editorial critique, A Conversation about “The Proposed Confession of 1967,” now widely distributed in two versions.

Another development last month was the unveiling of a blue-ribbon Presbyterian Lay Committee, Inc., dedicated to restoring respect for biblical authority in the official denominational framework. The group, according to President Roger Hull, aims to work with the National Council of United Presbyterian Women and the National Council of United Presbyterian Men in fulfilling five objectives.¹“To enlarge the emphasis on the teaching of the Bible as the authoritative Word of God in our seminaries and churches; to emphasize at every opportunity the need for preaching the Gospel of redemption with evangelical zeal, the need for regular Bible study and prayer; to encourage ministers and laymen alike to take their place as individuals in society and, as led by the Holy Spirit, to become involved in the social, economic and political problems of our time and to assert their position as Christian citizens on all such matters; to discourage public pronouncements by the Church as a corporate body on political, social and economic issues; to provide an adequate and reliable source of information for laymen on the issues being proposed for consideration at General Assembly and other judicatories in order to enable laymen to express an informed position.” It has been in the planning stage for many months and is part of a restive lay movement in several mainstream denominations. Its nineteen-member board includes Hull, prominent New York insurance executive, chairman J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, former Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington, and TV personality Bud Collyer. Invitations are out for charter members.

Says Hull, “We are seeking dedicated lay men and women who are concerned about our church and who are willing to become involved at the presbytery, synod and General Assembly level in order to influence the church to exert her efforts to the mission of preaching the Gospel of redemption.”

The bid to involvement is especially important, for some observers feel that indifference and premature surrenders have aided church revisionists. Some evangelicals disappointed over the proposed new confession lament that two or three theological conservatives resigned from the drafting committee.

The pressures to conform often become intense, however, and here and there evangelicals throw in the towel. The latest is Dr. Stuart H. Merriam, a promising preacher whose dispute with New York Presbytery became a cause célèbre in 1962. Citing an assortment of relatively minor improprieties, the presbytery refused to allow him to retain his pulpit at Broadway Presbyterian Church. This fall, the 41-year-old Merriam severed all official ties with the denomination and announced he would return to New Guinea, where he has set up a small, independent missionary effort. Merriam will be accompanied by his bride of two months, the former Caroline Robinson, who served as his secretary at Broadway.

Many theological conservatives among United Presbyterians feel that time and truth are on their side as they stay put and press for their convictions. This was the rationale for the Chicago meeting, where conservatives probed a joint strategy focused on the confession. The main question at Chicago was whether the 4,200-word document was hopelessly heretical or could through amendments be shifted to a more biblical base. The key issue was the new confession’s viewing Scripture, not as the inspired Word of God, but as the mere “normative witness” to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

A broader problem faced by United Presbyterian evangelicals is what to do with those clergy and lay leaders who have made confessional vows in the past but do not now subscribe to them. Whatever else it may or may not be, the new confession is widely described as an effort to make honest men out of heretics. In short, it would legitimatize aberrations by relaxing long-held scriptural standards.

Few evangelicals are willing to crusade for a wholesale exodus of heretics, and most prefer an attempt to salvage their denomination over desertion. But short of a mass exodus, United Presbyterians will have to work out an alternative to assigning official sanction to intellectual dishonesty.

The “subscription” questions actually are an issue separate from the debate over confessions. The committee that drafted the proposed new confession also took the initiative in recommending far-reaching changes in the theological test given candidates for ordination and commissioning (see May 7, 1965, issue, page 53).

The fate of the confession and allied proposals is currently in the hands of a specially appointed revision committee, at least five of whose fifteen members are known as theological conservatives. The committee is open to suggestions until January 15 and is expected to present an amended version of the proposed confession to the United Presbyterian General Assembly in Boston in May.

If the confessional package is approved in Boston, it will be submitted to a vote of presbyteries. Then, if two-thirds of the presbyteries voice approval, formal adoption will be possible at the 1967 General Assembly in Portland, Oregon.

Westminster Confession

Caught in the middle of the current theological strife among United Presbyterians is the majestic Westminster Confession of Faith, which dates back to the 1640s and includes what is perhaps the most eloquent rationale for scriptural authority to be found in the annals of Christendom (see next page). The proposed Confession of 1967 does not explicitly unseat a prior claim for the Westminster Confession, for the latter is slated, with six others, to be preserved alongside the new creed. In at least several aspects, however, the new confession obviously supersedes Westminster, which while not considered flawless has nevertheless served as a standard for Presbyterian and Reformed groups everywhere.

The Westminster Confession was the most illustrious of several historic theological documents produced in the strife-torn Britain of the seventeenth century by the group now referred to as “the Westminster Divines.” They were the 151 members of a special advisory commission appointed by Parliament to determine what constituted the true church. Thirty of them were members of Parliament, and the rest were clergy men from England and Scotland. They conferred in Westminster Abbey, holding more than a thousand all-day meetings.

While most of the clergymen on the commission had been ordained by the Church of England, they had become nonconformists when King Charles I attempted to force upon them doctrines they considered alien. The doctrines of this group of nonconformists eventually became those of the Presbyterian communion.

Conversation Sampler

Here are significant excerpts from a revised version of A Conversation about “The Proposed Confession of 1967,” from Presbyterians United for Biblical Confession:

What are the merits of the proposed “Confession”?

It is a serious and needed effort to make the creed of our church speak to the need of our day in the language of our day. It endeavors to state the essence of our faith and practice so that it may be understood by United Presbyterians and by other churches in ecumenical conversations.

In what areas does the proposed “Confession” need to be revised to make it more truly Biblical, evangelical, and consistent with our Reformed faith?

I. The deity of Christ should be affirmed with no less clarity and emphasis than his humanity.

II. The inspiration of the Bible needs to be affirmed and a clearer statement of its authority presented.

III. Reconciliation between God and man needs stronger emphasis and the requirement of repentance and faith needs to be more clearly affirmed.

IV. The section “Reconciliation in Society” needs some revision and also extension to additional areas of social concern.

V. Under the questions for ordination, the subscription required regarding “the Scriptures” and “the confessions” needs to be changed and strengthened.

What is the central theme of the proposed “Confession”?

“God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which He has called his Church …” (lines 34, 35).

How is God’s part in this work of reconciliation interpreted?

As a “reconciling act” seemingly fully accomplished.

How is man’s part interpreted?

Man is apparently represented as a beneficiary of God’s act of reconciliation regardless of personal response. The “Confession” states: “The risen Christ is the Savior of all men” (line 69), “In him man is victorious over sin and death” (lines 59, 60), “God’s reconciliation of the human race creates one universal family” (lines 298, 299).

But is man not required to repent and believe in order to be effectively reconciled?

So the Scriptures teach, and we feel this truth needs to be stated more clearly and emphatically than is done in the proposed “Confession.”

What about the key passage in 2 Cor. 5:20 to which the Committee refers in its “Introductory Comment and Analysis”?

This passage itself indicates that in the world some are and some are not reconciled. Very strangely, the concluding statement of 2 Cor. 5:20 is omitted: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”