Columbia Theological Seminary
Volume LVII, No. 2
April, 1964
Contents
Page
1 "God And The State : A Plea For Prayer In The
Schools" By Dr. William Childs Robinson
27 "In Whom Do We Trust, Anyhow?" Address given by
Mr. Harllee Branch, Jr.
35 Montreat Pastor Keeps Rendezvous with LBJ From
Asheville Times.
39 Annual Meeting of the Alumni Association
40 Fellowship Winners 1964
41 From Rome To Edinburgh
COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
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DECATUR, GEORGIA
Volume LVII April, 1964 No. 2
Published quarterly by the Directors and Faculty of Columbia Theological Seminary
of the Presbyterian Church, U. S.
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Foreword
This article represents research done by Dr. Wil-
liam C. Robinson under an assignment of the Perma-
nent Theological Committee of the General Assemb-
ly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.
In mimeographed form, the substance of the arti-
cle was one of several papers presented to the mem-
bers of the Permanent Theological Committee. In its
present revised form, it is here offered for the first
time. The resolutions at the end were one of four con-
trasting papers prepared at the request of Dr. Dean
M. Kelley of the National Council of Churches for
consideration at the National Study on Church and
State in Columbus, Ohio, February 4, 1964.
God and the State:
A Plea for Prayer in the Schools
The 1963 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church
in the United States expressed concern lest factors in our con-
temporary life be encouraging the development of the con-
cept of a total disconnection between the American State and
the God of Biblical revelation. Among these factors are recent
decisions of the Supreme Court declaring state laws requiring
Bible reading and prayer in the schools to be unconstitutional
and the actions of certain ecclesiastical bodies which support
or even exceed the decisions of the civil court. Our Assembly
asked for a comprehensive study of the relationship between
the State and our Nation's religious heritage of faith in God.
The tragic events of November the twenty-second have
lent poignancy to this concern of our General Assembly. In
those earth shaking hours the hearts of the American people
turned to God as a very present help in trouble. This common
response was evidenced in spontaneous gatherings for prayer
and was amply expressed by our representative spokesmen.
Thus both these acts of worship and the words of our leaders
which follow attested the reality of our Nation's heritage of
faith in God. President Kennedy expected to close his address
in Dallas on that day with a citation of Psalm 127: 1,
Except the LORD keep the city, the watchman
waketh but in vain.
His Thanksgiving Proclamation asked us to express our
gratitude for the glorious gifts of God and humbly to pray that
He continue to guide and sustain us. When informed of the
shooting, General Eisenhower reported, "Each of us in his own
way said a prayer for the President." Premier Pearson of Cana-
da prayed, "May God comfort those close to him in this hour
of sorrow and desolation." The new President, Mr. Lyndon
B. Johnson, pledged, "I will do my best: that is all I can do.
I ask for your help; and for God's." As the Congressmen of
both parties left the new leader that night each man said to
Mr. Johnson, "God bless you." Mr. Adlai Stevenson concluded,
"At such a moment we can only turn to prayer. May God
help us." According to Senator Goldwater, sorrowing America
will rise "from prayerful knees." Governor Nelson Rockefeller
concurred thus, "May God Almighty grant strength to Lyndon
Johnson for the task that is his." To which sentiments Gov-
ernor Carl Sanders adds, "It is time that we turn to God, for
comfort, for strength, for guidance."
From these current affirmations we move to
I. A Historical Survey of the Religious Heritage of
the Anglo-American State.
"The Western World as we know it, the civilization of
Europe and America, has been created by Christianity"."*
The worship of the living God brought order, civilization,
education, and unity to old England through such men as Au-
gustine of Canterbury, Aidan of Landisfarne, Theodore of
Tarsus, Venerable Bede and Alfred the Great. The last named
began his laws with the Ten Commandments and was con-
stantly inspired by the name of God to wage his heroic battle
that the light of learning, law and order which springs from
Christianity might not be engulfed in the darkness of pagan
*G. Elson Ruff. The Dilemma of Church and State. 1954. p. 14.
2
ignorance and chaos. And nothing would do more to stem
the wave of immorality and crime which is sweeping our cur-
rent American civilization than the regular recitation of God's
Ten Words in the Church, the home and the school. When this
was an essential part of the Huguenot worship, these people
became known for their honesty, their industry and their in-
tegrity. Zeal for God as well as for the human rights He has
granted inspired Stephen Langton and the barons at Runny-
mede. It was the Bible recovered and rendered into English
which united Scotland and England to make Great Britain.
God's providential dealings with sundry of the groups
which came to America seeking liberty had prepared them to
support the cause of American independence. With his deep
realization of the seriousness of sin, Calvin had advocated
lower magistrates as a check upon the chief magistrates. (In-
stitutes, IV, xx. 31, 8.) John Knox and Christopher Goodman,
How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed, went beyond Cal-
vin in advocating the right of the people through their re-
ligious and civil leaders to limit the powers of the sovereign.
This line of thought was developed among the Presbyterians
of Scotland by George Buchanan, De jure regni apud Scotus,
1578, Andrew and James Melville, Alexander Henderson,
Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex, Stewart of Goodtrees, Jus Popu-
lij James Renwich, The Informatory Vindication, Alexander
Shields, A Hind Let Loose. It was for the right to worship
God solely according to His Word that the Presbyterians of
Scotland and the Puritans of England rose against the absolu-
tism of Charles the First and restored the rights of free men.
Following the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, there
was a steady stream of Huguenot political thought demanding
the limitation of a king when he becomes a tyrant. 1 According
to Theodore Beza, Francis Hotman and Philip Mornay, God
makes a pact, covenant or contract between king and people.
There are two ideas here, namely, that all authority comes
from God and that regimes are founded on the consent of the
people. Likewise the German Palatines fled from the absolu-
tism of Louis XIV of France who was devastating their land
and persecuting their religion.
tP. Fuhrmann. Philip Mornay and Huguenot Challenge to Absolutism, 1964.
o
D
The right to worship God according to His Word as one's
conscience directed inspired the founding of the majority of
the American colonies. The preaching of Jonathan Edwards,
the Tennants, George Whitfield, and their associates in the
Great Awakening gave the first sense of American unity to
these colonies. William Tennant, Pastor of the Circular Church
in Charleston, was both a hot gospeller and a fiery patriot.
During the Revolution, he traveled all over South Carolina
preaching the revival and advocating the cause of the Con-
tinental Congress.
In 1775 the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in Abingdon, Vir-
ginia, in Baltimore, Maryland, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in
Mecklenburg, North Carolina, as well as the Puritans in St.
John's Parish, Georgia, made deliverances looking toward in-
dependence. Moreover, Continental Congress was being
opened with the reading of a Psalm and the offering of prayer
to God by Pastor Duche, the Episcopal Rector.*
From such backgrounds, and in this context, the one divine
in the Continental Congress, Dr. John Witherspoon of Prince-
ton, advocated both the resolution and the Declaration of In-
dependence. With moving eloquence, Witherspoon pledged his
own reputation, property and life to the sacred cause of his
country and so prevailed upon the members of the Continental
Congress to commit themselves by signing the Declaration
of Independence. The appeal in this document to the Crea-
tor Who gives rights to men and lays upon them the duty of
maintaining the same and to Providence to vindicate their
commitment to this end expressed the faith that God stands
sovereign over all the rulers of men and demands justice and
liberty for all.
The United States of America became a nation under
the blessing of the God of Biblical revelation. As according
to Blackstone, the standard expounder of English law, "Chris-
tianity is part of the Common Law of England," so this senti-
ment has been recognized by the highest courts of several of
our American States. - Indeed, even Mr. Justice Clark in the
recent Abington School v. Shemp admits that from the May-
*George Bancroft. History of the United States, VII. pp. 194-6: 206-7; 370-3; 131-2.
-Cf. for citations. SchafT. P.. A History of the Christian Church, IV. 393.
flower Compact to the Constitution "religion has been closely
identified with our history and government." The Constitution
of the United States is dated in the year of our Lord, 1787,
while some forty-nine of the Constitutions of our fifty States
acknowledge our indebtedness to God, e.g., "We, the people
of the State of Maryland, grateful to Almighty God for our
civil and religious liberty . . . ."
For the great body of American patriots, represented by
John Witherspoon, "Government is derived from the consent
of the governed in only a secondary sense. Its sanction is ulti-
mately of God to Whom it is responsible." 8 From earliest days
we have enjoyed the blessing of which the psalmist sings,
"Happy is that people whose God is the Lord." (Psa. 144: 15.)
II. The Wall of Separation.
This organic development of law, order, culture and na-
tion has been jeopardized by the building of a wall of separa-
tion between nature and grace and consequently between the
State as allegedly built on natural law and the God of grace.
Thus men assumed that the State arose without and exists
apart from the God of Biblical revelation.
Thomism
Thomas Aquinas developed the concept of Nature in dis-
tinction from the Supernatural. For Thomism, man by his
fall has lost the similitudo but not the imago del. This means
that his unaided reason is still able to discern first principles,
practice cardinal virtues, build a natural theology, discover
natural law, and establish a just state. He needs the super-
natural gifts only to complete what nature has already begun,
that is, to exercise the theological virtues of faith, hope and
love. Accordingly, natural law is the basis of the State and
supernatural grace that of the Church.
From Greek philosophy and Roman law, 4 scholastic rea-
son deduced the assumption that natural law derives ultimately
from God. Accordingly, the body politic is to be organized for
the fulfillment of the ends proper to man's distinctive human
3 John R. Richardson. Romans. Baker. 1963. p. 131.
^Cicero. De Leg. I.. 6. 8.
5
nature. The State exists that men may live according to the
principles which God has naturally ordained for the ordering
of human society. This means that the State as such has no
connection with the God of Biblical revelation.
Where the Church also exists, however, Thomas regarded
this natural order as subordinate to the supernatural grace
embodied in the Church. Moreover, since the ends of the State
are temporal, they must be subject to the eternal ends of the
Church, namely, the final felicity of souls in the Kingdom of
God. 5 In similar vein Hildebrand compared the figure of the
Church to the sun and the State to the moon, which only shines
in the light reflected from the sun. With such analogies, Pope
Innocent III largely dominated the civil authorities, but with
Boniface VIII the papal hegemony began to crumble as the
States asserted their God-given responsibilities.
Deism
The main premise of the deists was the conception of God
handed down by scholasticism." Making themselves heirs of
the separation between natural law and supernatural revela-
tion, the French and English Deists assumed that only the
lumen naturale mattered. For Matthew Tindal and his fol-
lowers, Christianity was as old as the Creation, so that what-
ever in it is new r is not true and whatever is true is not new.
The relevant elements are a republication of the laws of nature
which are open to all men either by their innate ideas which
could not be affected by original sin, or by the principles of
their sufficient human reason. The result is what Tom Paine
calls the age of reason or the age of human absolutism.
According to this thinking, the State is derived from the
rights of men more than from the grace of God. For Rousseau,
the education of children is according to nature. These posi-
tions appear in the French Declaration of Human Rights,
1789, and to a lesser degree in the American Declaration of
Independence, 1776. According to Barth, both understand the
state from the point of view of man or the sum total of men
5 E. H. Stokes, A Conception of a Kingdom of Ends in Augustine, Aquinas, and
Leibnitz, Chicago, 1912.
cjohn Orr, English Deism, 1934, p. 51.
6
making up the nation, but the Calvinism gone secular in the
American document is preferable to the Catholicism gone
secular in the French one. 7 In the French statement sovereignty
lies completely in the people; in the American the rights are
given by the Creator and His Providence is trusted to sustain
the duty He has given men to maintain their rights. Now while
Witherspoon, who supported the document, opposed deism,
Thomas Jefferson, the author of our Declaration, drew on
deistic writers and represented such influential deists as Ben-
jamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Ethan Allen. Ambiguously,
"two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence
were Anglican laymen, essentially deist in their outlook." 8
Later in the Alien and Sedition Controversy, Jefferson
took the Unitarian minister, Dr. Joseph Priestley, and the
materialistic philosopher, Dr. Thomas Cooper, as his proteges.
He tried to make the latter president of the University of
Virginia, but being blocked in that attempt by the Presbyter-
ians, he got Cooper in as president of the College of South
Carolina. There he became the High Priest of Nullification
and the First Prophet of Secession. Eventually, Presbyterian
influence forced him out of the presidency of the Columbia
(South Carolina) institution. Jefferson's own views are in-
dicated in his arrangement of the Greek, Latin, French and
English renderings of the Gospels, commonly known as Jef-
ferson's Bible but formally entitled The Morals of Jesus. 9
Every miracle is excised from the accounts and the volume
closes,
"There laid they Jesus and rolled a great stone
to the door of the sepulchre and departed."
In a personal opinion Jefferson went beyond the Declara-
tion of Independence when he spoke of the First Amendment
to the Constitution as "building a wall of separation between
church and state." His figure of speech has become a rule of
law for our modern jurists, "the great American principle of
eternal separation," or the complete separation between State
and religion. By using the Thomist separation between nature
7 K. Barth, Die Protestantische Theologie im 19 Jahrh, 1947, pp. 31-33.
s Dillenberger and Welch, Protestant Christianity, 1954, p. 143.
9 As well as in his anti-clericalism. Cf. F. C. Leubke in Church History, September,
1963.
and grace, and removing God's gracious intervention for our
salvation, deism has built its wall of separation not only be-
tween Church and State, but also between the God of Biblical
revelation and the State. It now condemns statutes passed by
the several States for the recognition of the living God in brief
and simple acts of Biblical worship at the opening of each
school day. At the same time, in the interest of academic free-
dom, teachers are permitted to inculcate scientific and economic
theories which give God no place in the origin or history of
man and which deny the possibility of His direct act in the
raising of Jesus our Lord from the dead. Thus positivism and
secularism are on the verge of making the public schools to be
non-God or irreligious. The wall of separation is issuing in a
secular State and a pagan public school.
Is freedom of religion to become synonymous with free-
dom from religion, or with established non-religion? Is free-
dom's holy light that shone from our fathers' God, the Author
of Liberty, to be exchanged for the slavery which issues from
anti-God communism? How can we rear men to be citizens
with a sense of responsibility, without presenting the God to
whom they are responsible, or soldiers with a will to stand for
the God of our fathers when they have not been educated in
His Presence? Schools without a word from and a prayer to the
living God will not build in their pupils the stamina to stand
against atheistic communism when the going is hard.
We ought to be exalting in our schools, as well as in our
churches and homes, the Ten Commandments, God's banner
against the floodtide of disorder, violence, crime and immoral-
ity which is sweeping our civilization. Instead we are decree-
ing that the schools no longer teach the oncoming generation
even to acknowledge the Lord as the Good Shepherd of the
Psalms, the Heavenly Father of the Gospels. Such folly invites
increasing Godlessness and the judgment of the Almighty
Whose warning is
"The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all
the nations that forget God." (Psalm 9:17.)*
*Cf. G. E. Ruff, op. cit. p. 103, "The Way of the No-God leads to a totalitarian
doom. The way of the true God leads to freedom and life."
and Whose final answer to those who take counsel against Him
is
". . . the Lamb shall overcome them, for he is
Lord of lords, and King of kings." (Rev. 17 : 14) .
The human absolutism of the eighteenth century has,
moreover, spilled over into and modified the testimony of our
Churches. The Preface to the Westminster Form of Presby-
terial Government is a glorious affirmation of Christ as the
Head and King of the Church. Where this Headship and King-
ship of Christ is the cornerstone of Presbyterianism, there issues
a confession of faith that it belongs to Christ's majesty to rule
and teach the Church through His Spirit and Word by the
ministry of man. 1 " And "the mission of the whole Church is
to establish in the whole earth the reign of Jesus Christ." 11
When, however, American Presbyterianism was reorgan-
ized in 1787-89, the Christological hub was replaced by Pre-
liminary Principles designed to secure "the approbation of an
impartial public" for the right to be a Presbyterian Church.
The foundation having been laid in general principles, a
church constitution was built with its radical principle "that
the majority shall govern." When one's Preliminary Principles
derive, even in part, from eighteenth century reason, the end
becomes a capitulation to secularism in order to please twen-
tieth century pluralism. Accordingly, the United Presbyterian
Church in the U.S.A., in pamphlets issued by the Assemblies
of 1962 and 1963, prepared for the current surrender of our
public schools to secularism by appeals to the pluralism of
modern society. The 1963 Assembly recommends that religious
observances never be held in a public school and that devotional
Bible reading and public prayers be omitted.
Writing in The Presbyterian Outlook for December 23,
1963 Elder Gerald Monsman Esq. of our Franklin Street
Church in Baltimore has pointed out the following flaw in
this UPUSA paper:
^Book of Church Order, Presbyterian Church, U.S., I, carried over from Preface
to the Westminster Form of Presbyterial Government and from the Second Book
of Discipline of the Kirk of Scotland, I. 13.
n D. G. Miller. The Nature and Mission of the Church, p. 72.
9
"Citizenship and church-membership are two separate
phases of our lives. They should both be Christian, but not be
confused. Failure to recognize these two separate aspects of a
Christian's life is, to my mind, the basic error of the report and
leads to its dangerous conclusions.
"Christians as citizens can and should work for the recogni-
tion of Christ as sovereign over the state, without denying to
non-Christians full freedom of convictions, and while keeping
their churches, as churches, organically separate from the
state."
A pronouncement of the General Board of the National
Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. declares
"Neither true religion nor good education is de-
pendent upon the devotional use of the Bible in
the public school program."
At the same time it leaves to the judgment of the local
school board the question of offering prayers on special occa-
sions 12 and it affirmed earlier that
". . . the nation subsists under the governance of
God and that it is not morally autonomous." 13
If the thinking set forth in the Preparatory Paper for the
1964 National Study Conference on Church and State of the
National Council of Churches is accepted, the result is even
more secularist. In direct opposition to our Biblical Confessional
doctrine that God has ordained the civil magistrate, Dr. J. M.
Swomley puts too much weight on Brunner's position that in
view of its compulsive character "the State is not an expression
of the will of the Creator." 14 Then he bases the public schools
on autonomous human reason and specifically excludes from
them any revealed set of truths, principles, religious instruction,
or faith, pp. 84-86, 98, 95. On the other hand, The Witness
of the Reformed Churches 14A stresses "the importance of learn-
ing how to think about political, social and economic issues in
the light of one's faith." On his premises, Swomley objects to
12 Pronouncement of NCC adopted by General Board June 7, 1963.
^Pronouncement of NCC adopted by General Board May 20, 1953.
14 John M. Swomley, Jr., Church-State Relations in Education Today, ed. Dean M.
Kelley, N. Y., 1964, p. 82, citing E. Brunner, The Divine Imperative, p. 445.
UA A statement of the Joint Committee of the Reformed Church in America and the
Presbyterian Church in the United States.
10
"under God" in the salute to the flag, p. 98, antagonizes
indoctrination in nationalism or in a particular economic or
political system, p. 85, and opposes Bible reading and prayer in
the schools as associated with the coercive function of govern-
ment, p. 96. On the contrary, when it suits Swomley's purpose,
he gives an entirely different account of the school as the place
where the pupil enjoys the experience of being loved and ac-
cepted in an order and dependableness that is not imposed as a
harsh discipline, p. 100. He advocates excusing Jehovah's Wit-
nesses from saluting the flag, p. 98, and conscientious objectors
from military drill, p. 99, but inconsistently holds that excusing
unbelievers from attendance on worship is treating them as
second-class citizens, p. 96.
In our opinion, these positions are too close to the utili-
tarian view that man's attitude toward the cosmos in which he
lives is all-determining, not his attitude toward God. Moreover,
we constantly need the reminder of Barth's weighty warning
"The Church is no longer the Church where it
does not know a higher authority than its own, or
an obedience other than that of self-govern-
ment." 15
The genius of Calvinism is a striving to see everything
not from man's point of view but from the viewpoint of God,
in every area to think God's thoughts after Him. Calvin "would
never have countenanced the secularization of the state; the
exclusion of religion from education would have seemed to
him madness." 10
Accordingly, we dissent from the thinking of these great
ecclesiastical bodies and ask a re-study of our Calvinistic and
Reformed heritage. We want to see this matter not through
the scholastic eyes of Thomas Aquinas nor through the deistic
logic of Thomas Jefferson, but from the Word of God with the
help of the giants of the Reformed Faith and our own Confes-
sion of Faith with the preamble adopted by the Westminster
divines. This means not a total disconnection between the State
and the God of Biblical revelation. Rather, the Presbyterian
Confession teaches that the living God has ordained the State
15K. Barth, K. D. I. 2:573-658.
10 J. T. McNeill, Calvinism, 1954, p. 234.
1 I
for His own glory and the good of the present and the oncoming
generations.
The second chapter of Jeremiah presents a very similar
challenge in ancient Israel. There the prophet reminds Jerusa-
lem of her first love when she went after the Lord in the
wilderness, and solemnly warns them that since they have now
gone from Him the Lord has a contention with them, and with
their children's children. Then follow these weighty words :
Hath a nation changed its Gods, which are no
Gods? but my people have changed their glory
for that which does not profit. Be astonished, O
ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be
ye very desolate, saith the LORD. For my people
have committed two evils: they have forsaken
me, the fountain of living water, and hewed
them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold
no water.
III. The State According to Calvin and the Reformed
Faith.
The Reformation operated with a deeper sense of the
gravity of the Fall and a greater need for grace and light from
God for sin-darkened man than that professed by Scholasticism.
Consequently, it did not assume that man could begin with a
natural knowledge of God, morality, and the State. For the
Reformers, the beginning of all true knowledge of God is
Jesus Christ clothed with His Gospel. They began with Christ
and read the Bible in the light of His atoning Cross and glorious
Resurrection, then they read nature in the light of the Bible.
Accordingly there are not two areas, the State governed by
natural reason and the Church by supernatural grace. Every
area of life is to be brought into subjection to the God Who
confronts us in His revelation. 17
17 While Calvin found some seeds of political order and a native love of truth im-
planted in every man, Inst. II. ii. 12-13, nevertheless this internal law engraved on
the heart needs to be clarified by the giving of the written law to men who are
blinded by the sins of arrogance, ambition and self-love, Inst. II. viii. 1, Library
of Christian Classics, XXI, 367-8, with footnotes. Nor can the human mind attain
any true knowledge of God without His Word, ibid I. vi. 2. Accordingly Calvin
begins not with "some blind light of nature.*' Letter of Francis I I, 2, but as a
disciple of Scripture with the doctrine of heaven, Inst. I. vi. 4, and in Scripture
the believer starts "with the Gospel which sets Christ alone before us with His
Cross.", Argument to Commentary on Genesis.
12
Rejecting the Thomist doctrine of a difference between
the image and the likeness of God, the Reformers held that by
the Fall the image of God was destroyed, effaced, or so deeply
corrupted that all that remains of it is a horrible deformity
{Institutes I, xv, 3-4). The New England Primer begins "In
Adam's Fall we sinned all." His realization of the gravity of
original sin led Calvin to favor lesser magistrates as a check
upon the chief magistrate and James Madison, who had
studied under John Witherspoon, developed the checks and
balances in our American system of government. Civil govern-
ment is to restrain evil men and keep the public peace that
society may not disintegrate and that opportunity may be given
the Church to proclaim redemption. Church and State owe
one another mutual aid and collaboration.
For Calvin, God has established two governments, both
for His own glory and our good. Even the State has not come
about by human perversity but by Divine Providence and
holy ordinance so that the magistrates should be faithful as
God's deputies for those doing good unto praise; for those
doing evil, avengers of wrath, Rom. 13. "For this consideration
makes a good king: that he recognize himself as a minister of
God in the government of his kingdom." 18 Yet Christ's spiritual
kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely dis-
tinct; the former occupied chiefly with the soul, with internals
and eternals, the latter chiefly with the body, with externals
and temporals. Under God, each is autonomous in its own
sphere. That is, neither is to rule over the other, but God is
over each and He has subjected us to both.
In Geneva "there was no question of a theocratic regime
in which the temporal power would be subject to the spiritual
power." 10 Rather, the problem there was how to prevent the
city-state from completely dominating the Church. Calvin was
exiled in 1536 and threatened with exile later because he would
not permit the City Council to dictate the worship and disci-
pline of the Church. He was never an official of the State and
during most of his ministry there not even a citizen. His struggle
18 Calvin, Letter to Francis I, cf. Institutes, IV, xx.
1!, F. Wendel, Calvin, 1963, Harper & Row, pp. 79, 309. Cf. E. A. Smith, Church
and State in Your Community, Westminster Press, 1963, "In Calvin's view no
King was a church agent for ruling the people ; he was God's own agent for civil
affairs," pp. 32, 54, 75.
13
was not to set up the rule of the clergy, but the reign of the
living God who confronts us in His revelation.
The Christian as a citizen seeks this sovereignty of God
in the State, while the same believer as a churchman promotes
the lordship of Christ the head over His body, the Church.
In Scotland it required definite testimony to keep the
State from invading the offices of the Church, as the witness
of Knox, the Melvilles, Henderson, the Erskines, Thomas
Gillespie and Thomas Chalmers attest. The issue of this Scot-
tish story is that
these two institutions, the Church and the State,
equally of Divine appointment, have a separate
existence, a distinct character, and an independ-
ent authority; and that it is impossible to identify
them, or to make the one dependent upon the
other.
Further, as ordained by God both the State and the
Church are to be accounted moral parties responsible to God,
and in consequence of this moral responsibility to God. bound
to recognize His revealed Word. 20
In his Stone Lectures at Princeton, Abraham Kuyper
insisted on a free Church in a free State, and showed that
Calvinism emancipates the State from the dominion of the
Church BUT NOT FROM GOD. Indeed, man's duty is to
serve God in the world, to praise Him in the Church, to thank
Him in the family, and to recognize Him in the school. Treat-
ing of Calvinism and Politics, Kuyper finds that there are three
concepts of sovereignty in the State, For the Calvinist, "All
authority of governments on earth originates from the Sov-
ereignty of God alone,'' or as the Scripture puts it, "By Me
kings reign," and "the powers that be are ordained of God."
It is a gracious gift of Almighty God when we the people are
given the liberty of choosing our magistrates. That this power
comes from God is recognized in varying degrees in the Dec-
laration of Independence, in the Articles of Confederation,
and in the Constitutions of most of our States. In the words of
the dissenting opinion of Justice Potter Stewart in Engel v.
-"Bannerman. James. The Church of Christ, I. pp. 102 ff.
14
Vitale, "We are a religious people whose institutions presup-
pose a supreme being."
Over against this recognition of Divine Sovereignty there
are the two contrasting views of popular sovereignty and of
State sovereignty. According to the one, man is the ultimate
as well as the proximate cause of civil power. Each time the
government meets it must inquire, first, is this the kind of gov-
ernment the people now want, and secondly, are we those whom
the sovereign people wish to govern them. This popular sov-
ereignty is the basis of the French Revolution and the Commu-
nist Revolution, both of which are anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-
religious.
The other alternative is that the State is in itself absolute.
Then the law is right no matter how wrong may be its mur-
derous liquidations merely because it is the law of the State.
This was the philosophy of Hitler and the Nazis as also the
militarists of the Japanese Empire. Against this position Gen-
eral Douglas MacArthur declared that it was one's theology
which mattered most in the affairs of nations. Today the United
States of America stands as the strongest human bastion against
the theories of ultimate popular sovereignty and ultimate State
sovereignty. But we can hold these lines not by the weak deistic
view that God has never intervened in the affairs of men, and
that the stone rolled over His tomb is the end of Jesus, but only
in the Biblical faith that Divine Sovereignty is the source of
civil authority and that His Father has exalted the risen Christ
to be Prince over the kings of the earth. (Rev. 1:5).
There is a forgotten chapter in our communion's history
which needs restudying. Dr. James H. Thornwell introduced
into our first General Assembly a paper on the relation of the
State to Christ in which he warned against the danger of
permitting the distinction between Church and State to issue
in a separation of the State from the Christian revelation.
As a moral person the State should recognize the Christian
revelation to the extent of not making laws contrary to the
Bible on which our chosen magistrates take their oaths of
office. The State condemns many things which many of its
subjects approve, and enjoins what many condemn. Thus com-
munists among us reject the right of private property, gangsters
15
disregard the sanctity of human life, and early Mormons prac-
ticed plural marriages. Yet the public conscience protects the
rights of human life, private property and monogamous mar-
riage, for the public conscience is a reflection of the law of
God, which law is enunciated with authoritative clearness in
the Scriptures.
Thornwell proposed that there be added, as an amend-
ment to the section in the Constitution providing for liberty of
conscience, a distinct recognition of our responsibility to God
and the supremacy of His Son Jesus Christ as King of kings
and Lord of lords, and a provision that no law be passed by
Congress inconsistent with the will of God as revealed in the
Holy Scriptures. We must regard it as a wise Providence that
caused Thornwell to withdraw this paper due to a lack of time
for its adequate discussion. The Confederacy was to fall on the
field of battle. The Most High so overruled that this recognition
of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ did not go down with the
collapse of the Constitution of the Confederate States of
America.
Our Reformed Presbyterian brethren of Pittsburgh have
long advocated an amendment to the Constitution of the
United States which explicitly recognizes our dependence upon
God. The Rev. Dr. J. Calvin Rose of Miami has received
favorable acclaim for his advocacy of a proper amendment
which will permit the reading of the Bible and the offering of
prayers in the public schools. Unless some amendment is
adopted, or unless the Supreme Court of its own accord per-
mits the local parents and taxpayers to exercise voluntary or
elective worship in the schools, we are likely to see the distinc-
tion between Church and State turned into a stone wall
seoarating the covenant children of our homes in their major
educational experience from the Word of the living God Who
has named them as His own in holy baptism.
In Nazi Germany, the Deutsche Christen bowed to the
national movement of race, blood and soil, but the Confessing
Church refused to be determined by this secularization of the
dominant movement. They heard the word of Romans 12.2.
"Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own
mould," Phillips tr. Instead the Barmen Declaration proclaims
16
that there is one word we have to heed in life and in death:
Jesus Christ as he is testified to in the Holy Scriptures, and
who is God's mighty claim on our whole life with no areas
thereof in which we do not belong to him. And if we may
permit the one who is credited with writing the Barmen Dec-
laration to make its meaning concrete, Professor Karl Barth
writes,
The state as such, belongs originally and ulti-
mately to Jesus Christ ... in its comparatively
independent substance, in its dignity, its function,
and its purpose it should serve the Person and
Work of Jesus Christ and therefore the justifica-
tion of the sinner . . .
In the decisions of the State, the Church will
always support the side which clarifies rather
than obscures the Lordship of Jesus Christ over
the whole which includes the political sphere out-
side the Church. The Church desires that the
shape and reality of the State in this fleeting
world should point toward the kingdom of God
not away from it.*
Now r prayer and the devotional reading of the Bible in the
public schools point toward the Kingdom of God.
The Witness of the Reformed Churches' 21 is first, the
reaffirmation of the sovereignty of God and His purposes in
history. "This sovereign purpose is embodied in the revelation
of Jesus Christ as Lord." Secondly, this unique revelation is
recorded in the Bible, the written Word of God; its content is
Jesus Christ; its authentication is the witness of Holy Spirit in
our hearts. Thirdly, as everything in life is related to God, so
the Christian thinks about every issue in the light of his faith,
and responds by the deeds of the law because he is grateful for
the transforming experience of grace.
*K. Barth, Community, State and Church, 1960, N.S.C.F., pp. 118, 170. Cf. S. C.
Guthrie, Jr. in Bulletin, Columbia Theol. Sem., June 1963, p. 28, "The first and
last primary thing we have to say about the world into which we are sent is that
it already belongs to Jesus Christ! . . . There is no part of the world, however hos-
tile or merely indifferent, over which He is net already Lord."
- x The Witness of the Reformed Churches, A Theological Statement of the Joint
Committee of the Reformed Church in America and the Presbyterian Church in
the U.S.. July, 1963.
17
From such passages as Rom. 13 and I Pet. 2:13-17, cf.
Psa. 86:9-10; 22:27 ;144: 15; Isa. 66:23; Rev. 15:3-4; 17:14.
Presbyterians teach that "God, the Supreme Lord and King . . .
hath ordained civil magistrates to be under him over the peo-
ple, for his own glory and the public good . . ." (Westminster
Confession XXV (XXIII) ) . From Mat. 28: 18. Eph. 1 : 20-23,
cf. Phil. 2:9-10; Coloss. 1 : 12-20; Hebr. 1 : 2-3; Acts 2: 25-35;
10:36; Rev. 1:5; Isa. 9:6-7. our Presbyterian Church. U.S..
confesses that "All power in heaven and on earth is given to
Jesus Christ by the Father who raised him from the dead, and
set him on his own right hand, far above all principality, and
power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is
named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come"
(Preface to Book of Church Order) .
The Reformed conception of the living God in His relation
to the State may be summarized thus: the living God is the
Lord Who confronts us in His Biblical revelation; He is the
Holy One of Israel before Whom the world is so sinful, lost and
hopeless that only God can help; in Jesus Christ God is the
Saviour of the world. Whose arms are ever stretched out to
fallen man in the words of promise, ". . . him who comes to me
I will not cast out'' (John 6:37) ; this God has established the
State as truly as the Church, the school as definitely as the
home, and His sovereignty over each ought to be recognized
in worship. For His might which made us. for His majesty
which governs us, for His mercv which saves us, we worship
God.
"Every day will I bless thee;
.And I will praise thv name for ever and ever.''
(Psa. 145:2.)
"For the Lord is good;
His mercy is everlasting;
and His truth (faithfulness) endures
to all generations." (Psa. 100:5.)
IV. The Recognition of God in the Schools.
Calvin sets forth the obligation of the ministers to con-
tribute to the moral education of the citizens, and recognizes
teachers as an office ordained by God in His Word for the order
18
of the schools. With great sacrifice and labor he established an
Academy in Geneva where the children of the city were edu-
cated in the knowledge of God and His works. The concerns
of the parents for their children, of the State for responsible
citizens, and of the Church for a believing succession were all
honored by the worship of God and the teaching of His Word
in this school system initiated by Calvin, headed by Beza. The
first plan for public education in Scotland was projected by the
Reformer, John Knox. Wherever the Reformed faith had free
course in Britain and on the Continent, schools were supported
in which God was worshipped and His Word taught.
In the American colonies, the first movements toward
popular education came from those who honored the God of
Biblical revelation. Mr. Justice Brennan, in his concurring
opinion in the recent Supreme Court decision, Abington School
v. Schempt, admits that "the use of prayers and Bible readings
at the opening of the school day long antedates the founding
of the Republic." In substantiation thereof, he cites the Rules
of the New Haven Grammar School in 1684 and the contract
with a Dutch schoolmaster at Flatbush, New York, in 1682. He
adds,
"After the Revolution the new States uniformly
continued these long established practices in the
private and in the few public grammar schools
and that this
"... exemplified the universal practice well into
the nineteenth century."
This means well after the adoption of the First Amendment
to the Constitution, and also means that the Constitutional
statements in the First Amendment, as adopted, did not refer to
State actions. Indeed, the Tenth Amendment reserved these
powers to the States.
Early in 1964, the Supreme Court of Florida unanimously
reaffirmed its earlier decision that the Florida law providing
for prayer and Bible reading in that State is constitutional.
Mr. Justice Stewart in his recent dissenting opinion shows
that after the passing of the First Amendment "each State was
19
left free to go its own way and pursue its own policy with respect
to religion," so that Massachusetts had an established Church
until well into the nineteenth century. He concludes,
"So matters stood until the adoption of the Four-
teenth Amendment, or more accurately, until
this Court's decision in Cantwell v. Connecticut
in 1940."
While the language of the First Amendment explicitly
limits only Congress, now the Supreme Court supports those
exercises of religion authorized by Congress, e.g. chaplains,
while it strikes down Biblical worship prescribed for public
schools by State law . Yet the States, rather than the Federal
Government, have been the chief agents in initiating and
supporting the public schools. Federal aid in support of the
schools is of recent origin, as is Federal ruling on prayers in
these schools.
The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establish-
ing religion. The Fourteenth forbids the States from depriving
any citizen of his rights without due process of law . There is
no amendment which gives the Federal Government power to
forbid the local community from having voluntary worship in
its public schools. Consequently, it seems that the First and the
Tenth Amendments reserve to the people this free exercise of
religion in their several communities.
Further, the fact that a school is public does not mean the
government of State or nation has the sole interest therein.
God established the home long before He ordained either of
these governments, and to the family He gives the children.
When parents claim the covenant promises of God for their
children in the Sacrament of Baptism, they also covenant on
their part to rear their children as God's children. These par-
ents and their neighbors are the taxpayers whose money sup-
ports the schools.* In this matter the government is largely the
*Cf. Address by R. L. Hunt. Dept. Church & Public School Re. X.C.C. at Purdue.
Oct. 8. 1963. "The classic doctrine in the United States was that the teacher stood
in the classroom of the American public school as the representative of the parents.
. . . The public school was really a school belonging to the parents, and the teacher
was there to help realize the purposes of the parent. . . . The parents of the com-
munity used the machinery of the state to collect taxes and to organize and operate
a school, but the school belonged to the parents.'* Hunt also cites the National
Defense Education Act of 1958. Sec. 101. par. 3. thus. "Congress reaffirms the
principle and declares that the States and local communities have and must retain
control over and primary responsibility for education."
20
tax collector and dispenser. "When the state finances schools,
it ought not to purchase control of the curriculum".* Are we
Christian parents to be taxed by a government which professes
to believe in God and have our school tax money used to give
our children a pagan education in schools which do not permit
even a brief recognition of God?
May God so bless America that we never see even a
shadow of that situation which the Turks meted out to the
conquered Christians in the Near East. By their Mohammedan
masters the Christian enclaves were forced to pay staggering
taxes and then to surrender the strongest of their sons to be
reared as fanatical Muslims for the Janizaries, the troops which
kept the Turk in power. During Hitler's regime the Confessing
Church properly refused to permit der Fuehrer to dictate their
preaching, even though the Nazi State was paying the salaries
of their pastors.
We hold that God has given to the parents, to the tax-
payers, to the people in the local communities, and to the
several States rights and powers in the conduct of the local
schools, and consequently that it is our duty respectfully to
assert and petition for the maintenance of these rights lest they
be curtailed in the interest of increased Federal domination.
To the same end, we advocate an amendment to the Constitu-
tion clarifying and preserving these rights.
In answer to the claim that the churches and the homes
are the places to teach religion. Dr. Vernon S. Broyles, Jr.,
replies:
"This is true, and the more effectively they do
the job the more positively people resist efforts
to remove God from our public institutions. God
is Lord of all life . . . and to acknowledge Him in
all our ways becomes a necessity for our well-
being."
W r hile we favor the teaching of the Bible as literature and
as history, such objective courses on religion and ethics are not
adequate substitutes for the recognition of God in worship.
We do not properly place ourselves above God as the scientist
*E. A. Smith, op. cit., p. 74. cf. p. 77.
21
does the elements he manipulates in his test tubes. The I AM
WHO I AM (Exod. 3:14) may not be treated as a mere
object or thing in the I-it relationship. As the infinite Person,
the eternal Ego Eimi called first Old then New Israel into the
personal I-Thou relation to Himself. Here the believer stands
far beneath the MOST HIGH in reverent worship, in humble
faith.
"All nations whom thou hast made
Shall come and worship before thee, O Lord ;
And they shall glorify thy name.
For thou art great and doest wondrous things :
Thou art God alone." (Psa. 86:9-10.)
"Jesus Christ, He is Lord of all." (Acts 10 : 36. )
PROPOSAL FOR GENERAL FINDINGS
Presented by
PROF. WILLIAM ROBINSON, Th.D.
Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.
Before the
National Study Conference on Church and State
National Council of Churches
Trinity Episcopal Church, Columbus, Ohio
Tuesday, February 4, 1964 8:00 P.M.
"THE GOD OF BIBLICAL REVELATION AND THE
SCHOOLS OF AMERICA"
"All nations whom thou hast made shall come
and worship before thee, O Lord." Psalm 86:9.
"All the nations shall come and worship before
thee, for thy judgments are made manifest."
Rev. 15:3-4.'
First, in these and sundry other passages the God of Bibli-
cal Revelation proclaims Himself the King of kings and the
Lord of nations so that we confess :
22
God, the Supreme Lord and King, . . . hath
ordained civil magistrates to be under him over
the people, for his own glory and the public
good. (Westminster Confession of Faith.)
and likewise we acknowledge that,
it belongs to Christ's Majesty from His throne of
Glory to rule and teach the Church through His
Spirit and Word by the ministry of men.
God has established two governments, State and Church.
Under God, each is autonomous in its own sphere, neither is
over the other. Christians are subject to both. But in view of
the separation of Church and State the believer has distinct
relations to each. As a citizen he is to seek the sovereignty of
God in civil or state matters, without denying to non-Christians
full freedom of convictions; while as a churchman he is to pro-
mote the Headship of Christ in His body, the Church. "Citizen-
ship and church-membership are two separate phases of our
lives. Both should be Christian, but not be confused."* In
keeping their churches, as churches, organically separate from
the State, American Christians should oppose State aid to
Church schools.
Secondly, in view of the current situation in which the
worship of God in the public schools is becoming more difficult,
the Christian as a churchman, and as a parent, ought to give
additional concern and enlarged support to education under
distinctly Christian auspices. Accordingly, we recommend:
A. That our homes return to family worship and
catechizing;
B. That our congregations be urged to strengthen
their teaching ministry in Communicant classes,
in Church and mission Sunday Schools, in an
added week-day period for Bible teaching and
worship, and in kindergartens for pre-school age
children, in each of which the revelation of God
in Christ Jesus be given the primary and the pre-
eminent place;
*Gerald Monsman, Esq., The Presbyterian Outlook, Dec. 23. 1963. p. 9.
23
C. That parents acquaint themselves with the Chris-
tian Schools now flourishing in Michigan. These
are not parochial but parental institutions, sup-
ported by Reformed parents as a means of keep-
ing their covenant baptismal vows to rear their
children as God's children;
D. That we cherish the Church and Church-related
grade schools and support additional educational
endeavors of this kind.
Thirdly, that America may escape the doom which awaits
all the nations that forget God, Psalm 9:17, and continue to
enjoy the blessings of that nation whose God is the LORD,
Psalm 33: 12; 144: 15, the Christian acting as a citizen should
use every proper method to continue the recognition of God
in the public schools.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States, 1791, forbids Congress from making a law establishing
a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Four-
teenth Amendment, 1868, forbids a state from abridging the
rights of a citizen by law or without due process of law. In
Cantwell v. Connecticut, 1940, the Supreme Court interpreted
the Fourteenth Amendment as applying the prohibitions of the
First Amendment to the state legislatures as well as to the
Congress. In the last two years state laws providing for worship
in the schools have been declared unconstitutional. In thus
seeking to prevent "an establishment of religion" by the States
in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment, there may unwittingly be established a religion
of secularism. And, "the way of No-God leads to totalitarian
doom," G. E. Ruff. The free exercise of religion clause in the
First Amendment and the reservation to the states and to the
people of all rights not delegated to the Federal Government
in the Tenth Amendment seem to sanction freedom to partici-
pate in acts of worship according to conviction of conscience
as well as not to participate.
Only recently has the Federal Government begun to
give support to and direction concerning the public schools.
Through the years the states, the communities, the local tax-
payers, and the parents have nourished this great institution.
24
Historically, biblical worship at the opening of school is as
truly a part of the American heritage as is the invocation of
God in our judicial and legislative halls and our President's
proclamation of a day of thanksgiving.
Therefore, we advocate,
A. That such worship as the law permits be carried
out, including exercises before or after the official
school day, and voluntary or elective activities
during the school day where there are also desir-
able alternatives for dissenters. Conscientious
objectors could be excused from worship as easily
as they are from military drill and from the
salute to the flag. In one class the pupils take
turns, one each day, reading a passage of his own
selection from his own Bible, and leading in
prayer.
B. That the Constitutional law be clarified by an
amendment to the effect that neither Federal nor
State Government shall deny to any citizen the
right to participate in* appropriate religious
worship according to the dictates of his own con-
science during a reasonable portion of the official
day in a public school.
Finally, that while we thus stand for the separation of
Church and State, we do not favor the divorce of the State
from God. While we advocate a free Church in a free State,
we recognize the living God who confronts us in His revelation
as the Creator of the universe, as the King over the nations,
and as the Lord of the human world which He has reconciled
unto Himself in Christ. As the Lord of all, He is properly the
Lord of the school, as He is Lord of the home, the Church and
the State, each of which has a tremendous stake in the school.
The daily recognition of God in the school fortifies our soldiers
for their fight against communistic atheism. As without God
life is void and meaningless, so without Him education is a
menace to the morals of the home, to the faith that has made
America great, to responsible citizenship, and to liberty under
law. That we may learn to love God with all, we ought to
worship Him in the school. This Republic was founded on
*(or to refrain from participation in).
25
freedom of worship, not on the elimination of worship. As in
Jesus Christ, God is for us, so "is He also God's mighty claim
on our whole life,'* with no areas of our life in which we do
not belong to Him. {Barmen Declaration, 2.)
26
MR. HARLLEE BRANCH, JR.
A native of Atlanta, Mr. Harllee Branch, Jr., is a graduate of Davidson
College, which recently conferred upon him the honorary degree, LL.D. He
earned his LL.B. degree at Emory University. After practicing law for a time in
Atlanta he was elected President of the Georgia Power Company, from which
office he went to his present post as President of the Southern Company. Mr.
Branch is not only one of the outstanding civic and industrial leaders of the South-
east but is an active churchman and an elder in the Trinity Presbyterian Church
of Atlanta. He is a highly useful member of the Board of Directors of Columbia
Theological Seminary.
The address presented here was delivered at the annual dinner of the Athens
(Georgia) Chamber of Commerce, January 9, 1964. It has been reprinted in the
Congressional Record.
27
In Whom Do We Trust, Anyhow?
We pause at the threshold of a new year, looking back-
ward to the year just past for clues as to how we can best meet
the uncertainties of the future. It seemed appropriate to me
that, in this situation, we ought to be concerned with matters
less transient than the rise or fall of such economic indices as
gross national product, per capita income, corporate profits,
employment, and the like.
We need to think on things much more basic to our indi-
vidual and national well-being; and one of them, if a business-
man who makes no pretense of piety may be permitted to say
so, is religion.
Two events in 1963 dramatically pointed up the need for
a reexamination of the unique role that religion has played in
the development of our national institutions and in the preser-
vation of our individual freedoms.
You will recall that early in 1963 the Supreme Court felt
called upon to reiterate its ban against prayers and religious
exercises in the public schools and, impliedly at least, in other
institutions supported by local. State, and Federal Govern-
ments.
Then as the year drew to a close, a somber, shocked citi-
zenry learned of the assassination of our President while en
route to a meeting where he had intended to invoke divine
blessing upon the purposes and programs of the Nation. He was
struck down, so the police said, by another young man who, in
his own words, had turned at age 15 to the purely materialistic
philosophy of Karl Marx as "a very religious man opening the
Bible for the first time'" ; and who, a few years later, sought to
exchange his American heritage for citizenship in atheistic Rus-
sia.
Please understand. I do not mean to imply a causal rela-
tionship between these two events. But I do suggest that in the
President's apparent assassin we had a dramatic illustration of
how a youthful and sensitive mind may be warped by intensive
study unleavened by faith in a supreme being. For, if police
28
reports are to be believed, the mind of this strange and with-
drawn boy had been totally absorbed in early youth by the can-
cerous ideas of communism. It seemed to me that there is a real
lesson to be learned here of how indispensable prayer and re-
ligious instruction are to the development of a generous and
humane citizenry, without which the American dream can
never be sustained.
It should be pointed out also that, in their anguish and
bewilderment over the President's death and in their search for
divine guidance in a time of national crisis, Americans of all
ages instinctively turned to prayer not only in their homes and
churches but also in the Halls of Congress, in the rotunda of the
National Capitol, and in other governmentally maintained
facilities all this in spite of the Supreme Court's suggestion
that prayers in such an environment might transgress the con-
stitutional requirement for a separation of church and state.
It may just be that the religious instincts of common man
are more trustworthy in a time of national extremity than
judicial sophistication and that 20th century Americans were
being reminded again in 1963 that a nation like ours dedi-
cated to freedom and individual rights can not endure except
as it places its dependence in God.
That was certainly the conviction of our Founding Fathers,
who, in the Declaration of Independence, dared to assert that
their "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" rested
upon natural and divine law; that these rights were the gift of
the Creator, not the object of concession by begrudging mon-
arches; and that governments existed only to protect and se-
cure, not to abolish or to alter these unalienable rights.
Theirs was not a new theory. As Secretary of State Rusk
has pointed out, the principal of divine law was "older than the
earth itself." It is a universal, unchanging truth "arising out of
a discourse on the nature and purpose of man which began in
Greece nearly 2,000 years ago." But until 1776, only Locke and
Rousseau and a few other political philosophers and religionists
had ever talked much about it. Never before had a whole peo-
ple dared to stake their lives and their futures on the truth of
this assertion.
29
The really significant thing about this Nation is that its
laws and institutions, its hopes and dreams, have been made to
depend on faith in a divine Creator. This is a fact that needs
reiteration constant and determined reiteration in a time
when our Highest Court, with an unmatched judicial abso-
lutism parading under the beguiling label of neutralism, seems
determined to eliminate God and religion from the curriculums
of our public educational institutions.
"Religion and morality are our indispensable supports,"
the Founding Fathers declared, and they added: "Whoever
shall subvert these great pillars of human happiness shall not
be entitled to claim the tribute of patriotism."
George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson all
of them acknowledged that only religion can establish the
principles upon which freedom and popular government must
stand. "The liberties of a nation cannot be thought secure,"
they said, "if we remove the only firm basis a conviction in the
minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God."
Benjamin Franklin the oldest, and in many ways the wisest,
of the men who formulated our Declaration of Independence
and our National Constitution put it this way when he arose
in the Philadelphia Convention to counsel his younger col-
leagues.
"I have lived, sirs, a long time, and the longer I live the
more convincing proofs I see of this truth that God governs
in the affairs of men. If a sparrow cannot fall to the gorund
without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise with-
out His aid? We have been assured, sirs, in the sacred writings,
that 'except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that
build it.' I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without
His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no
better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our
little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded,
and we ourselves shall become a reproach and byword to future
ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this
unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by
human wisdom and leave it to chance, war, and conquest."
Mind you, Dr. Franklin was not a religionist, not even a
churchman in the usual sense of the word.
30
It is no longer fashionable to talk in words such as those
used by Franklin and Adams, and Washington and Jefferson.
Virtue and faith and commitment to principle even patriot-
ism itself are scoffed at in many quarters. We have become
soft and smug and self-satisfied. We speak of ours as an age of
sophistication. We are beguiled by politicans and professors
who exhort us to abandon the "cliches" of our political, social,
and economic pasts, forgetting that sophistication is frequently
the product of conceit, cynicism, and shallowness; and that a
new "cliche" may be even more dangerous than an older one.
Fortunately our forefathers were not afraid of "cliches"
nor were they afraid to be called unsophisticated. They were
completely willing to embrace change where change was war-
ranted indeed, they risked their lives in one of the most dra-
matic assaults on the status quo the world has ever witnessed.
But they never sneered at the tried and the true merely because
it was old.
We moderns are vastly more knowledgeable than the
Founding Fathers, even the most educated of them. Indeed,
the sum total of man's knowledge has doubled in the last 10
years alone, and it is estimated that it will double again in the
next 5. But knowledge is not wisdom, and one of the greatest
threats to our way of life is that we may rely for leadership
upon politicians and judges who know more than they under-
stand. Knowledge mere factual knowledge, unleavened by
spiritual truths can be a snare and a delusion.
Today, the great threat to our way of life is posed by
atheistic and materialistic men, symbolized by the communistic
hordes of the East and typified by the first Soviet cosmonaut,
Titov, who declared on his return to earth from space: "Some
people say there is a God out there but, in my travels around
the earth all day long, I looked around and did not see Him. I
saw no God or angels. I do not believe in God. I believe in man,
his strength, his possibilities, and his reason."
How silly can man get? Who ever suggested that God was
such an entity as could be seen by an earthling like Titov?
But we must not become bemused by the idea that the
Titovs of this world are men of ignorance. They are as knowl-
edgeable as we in purely physical aspects of the universe and,
31
in some areas, their technology is believed to exceed our own.
The one the only resource we have that the Soviet man
does not possess is the resource of spiritual strength which is
derived from our recognition of the fatherhood and supremacy
of God and our dependence upon Him. Abandon this resource,
allow it to become tarnished by sophistication and by conceit
over our own assumed prowess, and we shall lose our individual
freedoms and our individual dignity as surely as have the slaves
of the Soviet super-state.
"Know the truth,'' said the lowly Nazarene, "and the truth
will make you free." Not facts, not scientific formula, not physi-
cal abstractions, not beguiling political theories but the truth
as revealed by God.
This was the truth to which the Founding Fathers repaired
in their time of national and individual crisis this was the
source of the principles upon which they founded this Nation
notwithstanding the sneers of those who in that day called
themselves "rationalists/'
Now again the rationalists and atheists and the materialists
are clamoring for acceptance in America and elsewhere. Only
a few weeks ago, a prominent American scholar suggested that,
since science has reduced the area of the unknown and since
technology has increased our ability to use our environment,
the relationship between God and man no longer applies. This
is sheer philosophical poppycock, the sort of poppycock that is
responsible for much of the "sickness'' of our times.
For mankind, with all his knowledge, has not replaced
God. nor w ill he do so. The greatest of our scientific discoveries,
properly correlated and evaluated, confirm rather than deny
the existence of a divine order and man's dependence upon it.
Those who founded this Republic sought, with God's
guidance, to create here a governmental system built on con-
fidence in divine law and the principles of individual freedom,
dignity and responsibility which depend upon that law and
not upon human actions and assurances.
It is a tragic thing, I repeat, that their progeny, if enrolled
in a public school, may no longer invoke, even in voluntary
classroom prayer, the guidance and blessings of the very God
32
upon whom the founders of the Nation so singularly relied.
Religious freedom is a cherished heritage of all Americans, but
it does seem strange that the principle of separation of church
and State should now be tortured into a separation of the
State from God for the two principles are certainly not the
same. What we need to do is bring God more vividly into our
school exercises, and into our governmental and private af-
fairs as well for, as Justice Frankfurter in a scholarly opinion
observed: "The ultimate foundation of a free society is the
binding tie of cohesive sentiment. Such a sentiment is fostered
by all those agencies of the mind and spirit which may serve
to gather up the traditions of a people, transmit them from
generation to generation, and thereby create that continuity
of a treasured common life which constitutes a civilization.''
It is not enough to say that our Supreme Court has still
left the individual right to pray in private and outside the
precincts of his State-supported institutions. The individual
has that right in Russia, too. But religion cannot be just per-
sonal. If it is real it must be present in all we do in public and
in private, and if we take God from our public institutions, we
are left with no foundation upon which to build.
We may produce as many and as excellent gadgets as
we will (automobiles, missiles, telephones, radios, television sets,
electronic computers, and what have you) but, America and
the Western World will not survive unless it also develops ex-
cellent men men of faith, of humility, of truth, of moral
stature, of strength, and resourcefulness of mind, (of pregnant
ideas), of courtesy, of universal sympathy and friendship and
love. Men such as these cannot be produced in a laboratory.
They are produced only in good homes, good churches, good
schools where the presence of God is ever apparent.
In closing, I would like to pass on to you a work of
kindly caution from one who, although not a native of the
Western World, has shown an extraordinary regard for its in-
stitutions. He is Dr. Charles Malik, distinguished teacher and
philosopher and former Lebanese Minister to the United
States. Dr. Malik has warned that: "If the West thinks that it
is going to win or even hold its own w ithout the living God who
made it and has sustained its excellence, it is simply mis-
33
taken. * * * Not by cleverness, nor by humanism, nor by senti-
mentalism. nor by the manipulation of force, nor by reliance on
reason and genius, nor by the supplying of loaves and the giv-
ing of machines not by any or all of these things alone is the
West going to succeed in defending and extending truth and
light and freedom, but by the humble return to the living source
of all truth, all light, and all freedom."
34
REUNION, TEXAS STYLE
The Rev. Calvin Thielman of Montreat, who at 17 managed Lyndon
B. Johnson's campaign for the U. S. Senate in Lamar County, Texas, is
shown greeting the President at the White House. The picture was sent
to Thielman by the President. Mr. Thielman is a graduate of Columbia
Seminary of the Class of 1955.
Montreat Pastor
Keeps Rendezvous With LB]
By MARY ELLEN WOLCOTT
This is the story of a 17 -year-old Texas high school boy
who thought he wanted to go into politics and a young Texas
congressman who knew he wanted to go into the United States
Senate.
35
Sixteen years have passed since the two Texans first met,
and the boy who wanted to be a politician is now a Presbyterian
minister the Rev. Calvin Thielman of Montreat.
The young congressman who wanted to become a U. S.
Senator now gets his mail at the White House President
Lyndon B. Johnson.
Recently the two Texans met again, for the second time
since the summer of 1948, when Thielman, at 17, was Lamar
County campaign manager for the aspiring senator "the
youngest campaign manager Johnson ever had/'
Thielman and the President met at the President's prayer
breakfast in early February, when the minister was impressed
again with Johnson's "friendliness and his way of remembering
friends. "
"The President stood up, put his arm around me, and
when I said, "I know you're going to be a great president," he
replied, "I just hope I can do as much good with my life as
you're doing with yours."'
"I always knew you would be president," Thielman told
him. and the President replied, "You helped put me there."
Both were probably, according to Thielman, remembering
that campaign in 1948. when Johnson won his seat in the
Senate "by 87 votes out of a plurality of almost a million votes."
A native of Lamar County in east Texas, Thielman re-
called that Johnson, in his race for the Senate, "was facing the
most popular governor Texas had had since Sam Houston, a
man by the name of Coke Stevenson, and it was hard to get a
campaign manager."
"The man who wanted to be Johnson's campaign manager
in Lamar County," he said, "was running for reelection as
county attorney and couldn't take the job. I had been on the
high school debating team and had won several speaking con-
tests, and impressed by my high school speaking record and
knowing that I had wanted to go into politics, this county at-
torney thought this would be a good place for me to start."
Thielman recalled, "I'll never forget what he said 'if we
ever have a president from Texas, it will be Lyndon Johnson'."
36
That summer, when Thielman had just turned 18, "John-
son came to town in a helicopter. He was the first person, as
far as I know \ who ever devised the idea of campaigning by
helicopter. They arranged for me to meet him some distance
from our town (Paris) and ride into town in the helicopter,
and that made quite an impression on the people."
In Texas, Thielman declared, "they take politics every bit
as seriously as they do religion."
Called "county roundups," political rallies "are held in
every town and community center and the churches, schools
and clubs cook pies and other food and sell them and the poli-
ticians speak. This goes on all summer long, except on Wednes-
day nights, when they have prayer meetings," the minister re-
called.
In east Texas in 1948 quite a few r people "lived back in the
sticks, and they would come into town to see the helicopter and
hear Mr. Johnson speak."
That summer Thielman, the high school debater, "spoke
all summer long on Mr. Johnson's behalf" and when it was all
over, "Mr. Johnson had won by 87 votes."
Johnson's close election to the Senate brought Thielman
"the first special delivery letter I ever got."
The election was so close, he recalled, that "every vote
counted, and my county made a much better showing than was
expected. Johnson wrote to offer me a job in Washington, but
I had begun to feel leanings toward the ministry so I told him
that I did not feel that I could come to Washington."
Ten years later Thielman was pastor of a church in
Waynesville, when Sen. George Smathers of Florida invited
him to open a session of the U. S. Senate with prayer.
"So I went up there," Thielman recalls, "and made the
opening prayer in the Senate, and when I finished, Mr. John-
son very kindly stood up and addressed the Senate and said
some very kind things about me. I had lunch with him that
day and I told him then that I had the feeling he'd be Presi-
dent of the United States one day."
37
From Waynesville, Thielman left for graduate study at the
University of Edinburgh before joining the Billy Graham staff
as a research assistant for a year and a half.
In September of 1962 he became pastor of the Montreat
Presbyterian Church and chaplain for Montreat-Anderson Col-
lege.
It was as Graham's guest he attended the prayer breakfast
in Washington, where he met the President.
For Thielman it was a pleasant encounter and he expected
nothing more. But when he returned to his hotel, there was a
message to call the White House, and the caller was the Presi-
dent of the United States, who, he said, had been calling all
over town to ask Thielman to come to the White House for a
visit.
The Montreat minister laughed when he recalled his reac-
tion. "I asked him 'How do I get in?' "
"It was sort of like walking in a dream, " he mused, as he
recalled seeing in the White House the faces so familiar on
television and in news sheets.
"The President could see I was very excited, but in his
friendly manner, he put me at ease. I was a little embarrassed
when I realized later what I had asked him. I have a twin
brother who has a barber shop in Paris, Texas, and when this
man, who runs the whole western world, asked what he could
do for me, I asked him for an autographed picture to hang in
my brother's barber shop."
Not only did Thielman get the picture for a Texas barber
shop, which his brother had requested, but the President in-
sisted on being photographed with Thielman.
This picture, another autographed picture and a note
thanking Thielman for a gift copy of a devotional booklet used
by Abraham Lincoln have all arrived recently in Montreat from
the White House.
For Thielman, who turned down politics 16 years ago to
become a preacher, his Washington visit proved his assertion
that "Lyndon Johnson has a way of remembering his friends."
38
Annual Meeting of the Alumni Association
The Annual Meeting of the Alumni Association will be
held at 12 : 45 o'clock P.M. in the Tull Memorial Dining Room
on Tuesday, October 27, 1964. Since facilities at the Seminary
are over-burdened it will not be possible for Alumni or their
wives to be housed on the campus. However, it will be possible
for the wives of Alumni who make their reservations promptly
to attend the Alumni Luncheon with their husbands.
Several classes are planning reunions at this meeting. Class
representatives who are arranging for these reunions are as
follows :
Class
1919 Fred J. Hay, Dillon, S. C.
1924 John D. Henderson, 3821 East 8th Avenue, Hialeah,
Florida
1929 Harry K. Holland, 606 Church Street, Marietta,
Georgia
1934 Jack G. Hand, 3427 Oak Street, Jacksonville, Florida
1939 Robert D. Earnest, Box 2086, Macon, Georgia
1944 Richard L. Scoggins, Box 1878, Panama City, Florida
1949 George Hoffman Smith, 321-F Ponce de Leon Ave-
nue, N.E., Atlanta 8, Georgia
1954 Cyrus S. Mallard, Jr., 3078 Sewell Road, S.W., At-
lanta 11, Georgia
1959 Roland P. Perdue, III, 1250 Lumpkin Street, Athens,
Georgia
39
Fellowship Winners 1964
Fellow ship Winners in the Graduating Class of 1964 are as
follows :
Marion McCoy Franklin -- Bryan Fellow
^mm^ Mr. Franklin was born and reared in
"^ B ^k Madisonville, Tennessee. His father
is a Presbyterian minister in Knoxville
Presbytery. McCoy is a graduate of the
University of Tennessee, and at that
institution he was on both the foot-
ball and the track team. Following
graduation from the University of Ten-
nessee he worked briefly as an Elec-
tronic Circuit Development Engineer.
While at Columbia Seminary McCoy
has been active in all phases of seminary life and has served as
Secretary of the student body.
Mr. Franklin is married to Rebecca Jane Powell of Sweetwater,
Tennessee.
Thomas Joseph Reeves Bryan Fellow
hhhbh| Mr. Reeves came to Columbia Semi
|k nar\ from Denmark. South Carolina
but was born in Ridgeland, South Car-
| olina. He attended high school in Den-
mark and later was graduated from
Presbyterian College in Clinton, South
Ik Ju Carolina. Mr. Reeves was active in all
m P X phases of college life and was gradu-
al 1 -A ated Cum Laude from P.C. He was
j|J| a member of the Kappa Alpha Social
^^^^^"^^^^^" Fraternity.
Prior to entering the seminary Mr. Reeves served the public
schools of South Carolina for four years as an athletic coach
40
and school teacher. While at Columbia he served as President
of the junior class and Secretary of the Society of Missionary
Inquiry.
Mr. Reeves is married to Delores Jeanette Spell of Denmark,
South Carolina. The Reeves have one young child.
James England Bowden Alumni Fellow
Mr. Bowden was born and reared in
Atlanta and was graduated from the
North Fulton High School. He re-
ceived his A.B. Degree in August of
1961 from Georgia State College.
While at Columbia Seminary Mr.
Bowden has served as Treasurer of the
student body.
Mr. Bow den is married to Jere Earing.
The Bowdens have three children.
From Rome to Edinburgh
Dr. Dewitz, Professor of Old Testament, Language, Liter-
ature and Exegesis of Columbia Theological Seminary, intends
to take a group of Students and Alumni to Europe in the sum-
mer of 1965, if enough people are interested. The idea would
be to visit places especially connected with church history in
Europe; the cost should be around $1,100.00, time about five
weeks, travel by air.
If you are interested please write to Dr. Ludwig R. Dewitz,
Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.
41