Columbia Theological Seminary Bulletin, 57, number 5, December 1964

mbia Theological Seminary
Bulletin

COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

701 Columbia Drive
Decatur, Georgia

Volume LVII

December, 1964

No. 5

Published five times a year, January, April, July, September and December by
the Directors and Faculty of Columbia Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian
Church, U. S.

Entered as second-class matter, May 9, 1928, the Post Office at Decatur, Ga.,
under the Act of Congress of August 24, 1912.

CONTENTS

Page
FOREWORD By J. McDowell Richards 3

ARTICLES

"Can Calvinism Live Again?" 4

... By Felix B. Gear

"A Commitment That Costs" 12

... By Richard Bass

"Lord of the Flies" 15

... By Harry B. Beverly

"Covenant or Contract?" 22

... By James Torrance

"The Good Samaritan Speaks to the Twentieth Century" 33

... By William T. Thompson

REVIEWS

Joseph Klausner Jesus of Nazareth 44

... By Samuel A. Cartledge

V. H. H. Green John Wesley 45

... By Stuart B. B abb age

Rachel Henderlite The Holy Spirit in Christian Education 46

... By Neely D. McCarter

Erik Routley The Man for Others 47

... By Neely D. McCarter

Hans Lilje Atheism, Humanism and Christianity 48

... By Stuart B. Babbage

Philip E. Hughes But for the Grace of God 49

... By Ronald S. Wallace

Edward J. Young Studies in Genesis One 50

... By Ludwig R. Dewitz

CAN CALVINISM LIVE AGAIN?

Felix B. Gear

To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly
places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.

Eph. 3:10.

These words come very near the end of one of Paul's long sentences and
are not really clear until seen in their context. He has been writing about
"God's mystery", not known to men until disclosed in the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, especially as proclaimed by Paul himself. The mystery was that the
divine purpose for his people the church was universal; "to make all
men see what is the fellowship of the mystery". And once this mystery is
revealed and understood it is seen to exhibit to angelic eyes the infinite
wisdom of God. J. B. Phillips puts it this way: "The purpose is that all the
angelic powers should now see the complex wisdom of God's plan being
worked out through the Church, in conformity to that timeless purpose
which He centered in Jesus, our Lord."

Calvin's exposition of this verse regards the church as a witness* to the
angels. It is a "miracle" in which angels see the astonishing wisdom of God
displayed in a manner never before known. They see the results of the dis-
closure of God's wisdom in the church it consists of all kinds of people,
of men and women from every nation and race but they never fully under-
stand why God has chosen to do this.

I wish to speak to you in the light of this text and of Calvin's under-
standing of it. As you know this is the 400th anniversary of Calvin's death.
As a teacher of Theology for many years I have often wondered why the
faith of Calvin Calvinism, as it is frequently called seems to have lost
much of its dynamic force and influence. Calvinism was once a movement
that changed not only individuals but nations, and society in all of its cultural
aspects. But within the last century, or even before, Calvinism has appeared
to be on the wane. Some of the essential elements which gave this way of
life such vision, vigor, and vitality have apparently dropped out of our
heritage along the way somewhat as fresh, living water of a stream sinks into
the ground or runs off into eddies as the dwindling main stream wends its way
toward the sea.

Calvinism began in the 1 6th century at Geneva and soon became a mighty
tidal wave sweeping over Switzerland, Holland, parts of Germany and France,
the British Isles and eventually America. Dr. A. Kuyper has pointed out that
Calvinism quickened the life of the people of Holland until they became one
of the most dynamic nations in all facets of their national culture of
Europe. You could easily perceive the pulsating vitality of the new way of
life as it spread throughout the length and breadth of Holland. Of course,
we know the same thing happened in Scotland, and the other countries to
which Calvinism went following the Protestant Reformation.

Dr. Felix Gear, Dean of Instruction, Columbia Theological Seminary, is currently
Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United
States.

Dr. Kuyper accounts for the phenomenal growth and strength of early
Calvinism largely by the fact that it was not merely a dogmatic scheme, a
theological system, but it was a complete way of life, a style of living that
affected every aspect of life religious, social, economic and political.
Everywhere Calvinism went, it attacked pride, arrogance and corruption of
the wealthy and royalty. It gave hope to and encouraged the poor and
ignorant. It is often mistakenly thought that Calvinism appealed only to the
rising middle class of the time but, as a modern English historian has pointed
out, its influence spread among the poorer classes the masses and the
discipline of their faith enabled them to overcome their poverty and ignor-
ance. The influence of Calvinism in this country was fairly well dominant
until about a century ago. One historian has said that its influence did not
finally play out until about 1875 when the popularity of Dr. James McCosh,
president of Princeton University, as a writer in philosophy, psychology, and
education was supplanted by that of William James and John Dewey. Dr.
McCosh published a very sane and able treatise on Evolution when many
people in this country were losing their heads over it. Some have not caught
up with his view even yet.

Calvinism at its best has always been concerned for the salvation of the
souls of men but it has never been the narrow concern for "saving souls" that
some views of evangelism have stressed. It has tried to relate the Christian
in the broadest possible way to all of life. As Calvin would say, the Christian
has to do only with God every moment of his life. Dr. B. B. Warfield has
described this kind of a Calvinist as one

. . . who believes in God without reserve, and is determined that
God shall be God to him, in all his thinking, feeling, willing in
the entire compass of his life activities intellectual, moral, spirit-
ual throughout all his individual, social, religious relations.
It is no wonder that a seventeenth century writer said, "I would rather see a
whole regiment of soldiers coming at me with uplifted swords than a single
Calvinist bent on doing the will of God." Do you suppose this could be said
about many of us Presbyterians today?

Why was this true of early Calvinism? What has dropped out of our
Presbyterian faith that has made it such an anemic force in our national life,
in the cultural, social, religious, moral and political spheres of the 20th
century? A Methodist theologian has said that early Methodism, while
rejecting much of Calvin's theology, took over his ethical teachings almost
completely, and that his influence in this field has been much greater through-
out Protestantism than that of his theology. I want to mention a few of he
elements in Calvin's thought, that seem to be neglected today, that helped
to make an earlier Calvinism the strongest force of any of the religious
systems that have stemmed from the sixteenth century Reformation.

Of course, I realize, as you do, that we do not read Calvin today merely
to learn what he said to the age in which he lived that we may repeat his
views as a remedy for the ills of our time, although much of what he taught
is timeless. What we need to do, as a Dutch theologian once said to me, is
to find out, from our study of Calvin, what he would say if he were here today
in the circumstances of our twentieth century. This is enough to shock us
out of our modern complacency as Presbyterians.

The first thing I wish to mention is Calvin's view of the Church. He was
fond of saying, "The Church is our mother." Now, what does this mean

today? It tells us that wherever you see men and women lifting up their
heads in faith the cross of Christ the Church has been there. It says that men
do not make the church, nor fashion it after their own liking; it is the
Church that brings us into existence as the members of the body of Christ.
The Church was here first and the individual finds the Church already here
as the child who comes into the world finds his parents there before him.
It is our mother, he said, it cherishes and nourishes us from the cradle to the
grave. It is here in the Church that the great decisions of life and faith
are made and the destinies of men wrought out according to God's redemp-
tive purpose. The only significant distinction John Calvin ever made between
men was between those who have faith and those who do not. The Church
consists of those who have responded by faith to the promise of God's forgiv-
ing grace in Jesus Christ. Faith is essentially our trust in Christ, and our
receiving him as he is offered to us in the Gospel for our salvation. As Melan-
chthon put it, faith is a sense of God's mercy in Christ. It is the acceptance
of the promise that while we are still sinful and unworthy; ungodly, and
ugly inside and out, in God's sight, because of our sin, God will freely forgive
us for Christ's sake. It is accepting Christ and his righteousness as our own
when we realize that there is nothing in us or about us that makes us worthy
or deserving in God's sight. As someone says, "faith is your acceptance of
God's acceptance of you when you know you are not acceptable to God".
God forgives us in spite of our sinfulness which we never fully lose in this life.

If faith is the human response to the preaching of the Gospel the
promise of God fellowship is the response to the presence of Christ
himself in the sacraments. The Church is essentially a fellowship of the Spirit
who binds us to Christ and then to each other in Christ. Our communion
with Christ, by its very source and nature, draws us intimately together in the
Church. But here, also, we have an "in spite of" element often overlooked.
Our communion with Christ is not on the basis of our merits or of anything
we are in ourselves Christ meets us where we are with all our weaknesses
and in our unworthiness. This is centrally related to the doctrine of justi-
fication by faith being forgiven though a sinner. For both Calvin and
Luther this concept became central in their thought of the nature of the
church. In other words, the doctrine of justification is not merely a theological
dogma; it also has vast practical implications: since God has loved and ac-
cepted us when we were unworthy and unacceptable, we in turn love and
accept each other in the fellowship of the church in spite of our common
faults and failures. Someone has said that the church is the place God has
put us, in the midst of people we do not like, and he keeps us there until we
learn to love one another.

There is more to this view of the Church it has been called the "com-
munion of the saints" for good reasons. We share our blessings with each
other for we realize that all good things come from God. The Reformers
stressed the necessity of our sharing every spiritual benefit with each other as
well as all our material blessings. Calvin says, "the legitimate use of all the
Lord's favors is liberally and kindly to share them with others." If some
of these statements on sharing were quoted without giving the source, we
might arouse the suspicion that we had been reading dangerous literature.
Neither Lenin nor Marx realized that Calvin had already expressed the
thought of their slogan, "To each according to his needs, from each accord-
ing to his capacities." In his exposition of II Corinthians 8:13-14, Calvin

has this to say: "God wills that there be proportion and equality among us,
that is, each man is to provide for the needy according to the extent of his
means so that no man has too much and no man has too little." As Dr.
W. A. Visser't Hooft observes:

If the churches had really taken seriously and practised this teaching,
Communists could never have been enabled to take this basically biblical
thought out of its Christian context and transplanted it into their ma-
terialistic and totalitarian outlook.
Truly, if the purpose of the Church is to increase the love of God in the
world, this kind of fellowship would display the abundant wisdom of God.
Those of us of the Presbyterian faith need to rethink in our 20th
century Calvin's doctrine of man. Unfortunately, we have been too one-
sided in our emphasis on what some call his "pessimistic" view of man
although most modern theological thought has moved close to Calvin at this
point once more. But we often fail to deal with Calvin's positive teachings
concerning the nature of man. We have been like the Calvinist who met a
Quaker at a crowded inn in his travels and had to share a room with him.
They got on so well early in the evening that they agreed to have their
devotions together at bed time. When the time for prayers came the Calvinist
knelt by his bed and began to confess his sins. He told the Lord what an
evil person he was, how many nasty and evil things he had done, and how
much he deserved to be cast into the lower regions of hell. Having finished
his prayer, he waited for the Quaker to pray but he did not hear a sound.
Finally, he heard the door latch turn and looked up only to see the Quaker
slipping out of the room. The Calvinist said, "I thought we were to have our
devotions together tonight." The Quaker replied: "I would not dare spend
the night with such a scoundrel as thou hast just confessed thyself to be." But
this is only one aspect of the Calvinistic view of man. There is another very
important part of Calvin's doctrine of man; it is as relevant in the 20th
century as was it was in the 16th.

An outstanding American theologian has said that Calvin's doctrine of
man has been one of the basic factors which has held our Western society
together and kept it free from totalitarianism. A British historian has said
the same thing in different words: No dictator has ever been able to lift his
head in a country dominated by the influence of Calvin. A professor at
New College, Edinburgh, has said that our western world owes more to John
Calvin for its liberty than to any other man.

Calvin's doctrine of the nature of man stems not only from what God
has done for man in Christ, but from the essential nature of man as created
by God. First, every human being has a common humanity. Everywhere
you find a two-legged creature shaped like we are, with the power of thought,
speech, and moral action, you see a man just like yourself. He said, whether
he be a Moor or barbarian, or as we may say Negro or Communist, every
time you look into his face, you see a reflection of yourself as if you were
looking into a mirror. He is never more eloquent nor more in earnest than
when dealing with this subject, and his other reason for urging Christians to
do good unto "all men without exception, though the majority are very
undeserving . . ." is that man was created in the image of God. Scripture
teaches us, he says, "that we must not think of man's real value, but only of
his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and
love". Thus we have no reason to refuse our help to any man who needs it.

Several pages of such teachings concerning the nature of man and our
obligation to him could be cited, but only a few examples can be given now.
Suppose he is a stranger, yet the Lord has pressed his own stamp on him
and made him as one of your family, and he forbids you to despise your
own flesh and blood.

Suppose he is despicable and worthless; yet the Lord has deigned him
worthy to be adorned with his own image.

Suppose you have no obligation towards him for services; yet the Lord
has made him as it were his substitute, so that you have obligation for
numerous and unforgettable benefits.

Suppose that he is unworthy of your least exertion; but the image of
God which recommends him to you deserves that you surrender your-
self and all your possessions to him.

We should forever keep in mind that we must not brood on the wick-
edness of man, but realize that he is God's image bearer.
If we cover and obliterate man's faults, and consider the beauty and
dignity of God's image in him, then we shall be induced to love and
embrace him.

Does it disturb or shock you when you realize that these are statements from
the pen of the first Presbyterian? As I have often said to students, the study
of Calvin will make better Christians out of all of us. The view of man made
our Calvinistic forbears so conscious of their neighbor that one of their
morning prayers ran this way: "O Lord so bless the labor of my hands this
day that when evening comes I shall have something with which to help my
needy neighbor."

It was this view of man that gave them such a strong sense of social
responsibility. It took a variety of forms as seen from an article on Calvinists
and Education, by H. D. Foster:

Such a sense of social responsibility illuminates the records of the
Genevan councils and consistory, the synods of the Huguenots of
France and their friendly societies in London, Dublin, and Charleston,
the Kirk sessions, presbyteries, general assemblies, and burghs of Scot-
land, the New England towns, churches, general courts, and 'the com-
missioners of the United Colonies of New England', with a story of
systematic and self-sacrificing provision for better social conditions,
improvement of health and morals, care of the sick in hospitals, fire
protection, sewage, and notably for a diffusion of knowledge and the
training of youth in 'knowledge of God and his way' and in 'gainful
occupation.' 1
A leading European historian has said that "Calvinism has become the
second great Christian definite social ideal of European society". Its sig-
nificance is seen in that is is one of the great sociological views in the modern
world:

In inner significance and historical power the types of French optimistic
equalitarian democracy, of State Socialism, of Proletarian Communist
Socialism, and of the mere theory of power, are, in comparison with
Calvinism, far behind. 2

1. Cyclopedia of Education, Vol. 1, p. 493

2. The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, E. Troeltsch, Vol. 11, p. 621

The same writer gives as one of the main reasons for the wide and rapid
expansion of Calvinism "its capacity to penetrate the political and eco-
nomic movements of Western nations with its religious ideals". This state-
ment is borne out by the history of Holland, Scotland, England and America.

We shall conclude our thought of Calvin's teaching concerning man by
recalling what Dr. A. Kuyper, one of the best authorities of his time on
Calvinism, had to say. He saw it as inevitable that Calvinism should ulti-
mately find its best expression in the democratic interpretation of life, pro-
claim the liberty of nations, and that it continue the struggle until both
politically and socially every man, "simply because he is man, should be
recognized, respected and dealt with as a creature created after the Divine
likeness". 3

We come now to consider a third aspect of Calvin's teachings which
has been almost forgotten or neglected in Presbyterian circles of our time
his doctrine of the Gospel, or salvation. I have often wondered whether or
not our comparatively meager achievements in Evangelism have any relation
to our oversight of Calvin's basic conception of salvation. Also, I think that
we have been influenced at this point as much by other branches of the
Protestant churches as at any other, perhaps more. Sometimes I think that
we have dehydrated our Calvinism in much that we say and do in the field
of Evangelism more than anywhere else. Some of our thinking and methods
in this area often appear alien to our whole conception of the nature of both
salvation and the Church. Dr. Lewis J. Sherrill touched upon this in his study
of our Christian Education Program about twenty years ago. This is a diffi-
cult problem, and it certainly is true that our home and social situation has
changed tremendously in the last half century. But, as Dr. Kuyper points out,
Calvinism is a way of life, a life system, or a style of life. It is not enough
merely to reach individuals, in isolation from family and society, they must
be intimately related to both. Nor is it enough merely to think of Evangelism
as an effort in saving souls. Evangelism in Calvinism is a call to a definite,
special way of life in which the whole of a man's life is to be lived as in
the presence of God. Dr. Kuyper reminds us of an important phase of our
Calvinistic heritage that seems to frighten and irritate some people who think
they are really strong Calvinists. He says that he delivered the Stone lectures
at Princeton some years ago "to eradicate the wrong idea that Calvinism
represented an exclusively dogmatical and ecclesiastical movement". In an-
other of his writings in a similar vein he has this to say:

Oh, it is so profoundly untrue that God's Word lets us hear only appeals
for the salvation of our souls. No, very definitely also for our national
existence and for our social life together, God's Word gives us fixed
ordinances; it marks Outlines that are very clearly visible; and it is
unfaithful in us Christians if we, noting this fact, impiously permit our
theory and practice to be determined by ruling opinion or conventional
law, consulting our own comfort. 4

Now, how does Calvin's doctrine of salvation differ from our ordinary
way of regarding it? And this is peculiar to Calvin, so far as I know. Our
faith in Christ, for Calvin, brings us a "double grace" or a twofold blessing
Justification and Sanctification. Justification takes place when faith is created

3. Calvinism, A. Kuyper, p. 27

4. Ibid., p. 55

in the heart of man by the Holy Spirit. It is the basis of our confidence in our
salvation and final acceptance in the last day. Sanctification is a gradual
process, the work of divine grace "whereby we are renewed in the whole
man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto
sin and live unto righteousness". Or as Calvin himself puts it:

Christ lives in us in two ways. The one life consists in governing us by
His Spirit and directing all our actions; the other in making us par-
takers of His righteousness, so that, while we can do nothing of our-
selves, we are accepted in the sight of God.
We note with interest that Calvin mentions sanctification our growth
in the Christian life before he does justification the renewal of our rela-
tionship with God. Moreover, in his Institutes he deals with the doctrine of
sanctification before he does that of justification. In other words, he does
not think of justification coming first, to be followed by sanctification they
both come to man at the very same time. Salvation is a single gift, although
it consists of two distinct benefits. But it is impossible to imagine that these
could at any time be separated in reality. They are distinct and can be sepa-
rated one from the other only in thought, but not in experience.

As Christ cannot be divided into parts, so the two things, justification
and sanctification, which we perceive to be united together in him, are
inseparable.

To try to separate them would be to tear Christ to pieces; it would be like
trying to separate the light of the sun from the heat which comes with the
light. The faith that brings us justification always brings the gift of repent-
ance which for Calvin accompanies us through life. Thus no one could
possibly experience justification without sanctification.

Perhaps it is easier, by now, to see why we say Calvinism has a broader
concern than is commonly put into the phrase "the saving of souls". Calvin
makes a great deal of this notion in his famous letter to Sadolet one of the
masterpieces of the Reformation era. Cardinal Sadolet had sent the people of
Geneva a very persuasive letter some time after Calvin had been expelled from
the city. His letter was an appeal for them to return to the Catholic Church.
They were told that the chief concern of their lives was the salvation of their
souls. This was in the hands of the Mother Church. Therefore, they had
better come home again. Calvin was chosen to reply to Sadolet. In his
letter, Calvin reminded Sadolet of what he had said about their concern for
their salvation. Calvin said something like this: "I want most emphatically
to deny that the salvation of a man's soul is his chief concern in life." He
admitted that it was a justifiable and important one, but not a man's chief
concern. He called this an insipid, selfish theology. The chief concern of a
man's life, he said, is to live for the glory of God. There you have the
essence of Calvinism at its best and in its days of greatest power and influence.

I have often tried to picture in imagination Luther and Calvin at the foot
of the cross. Both knew the same saving grace, the same free forgiveness, the
same sense of peace and the same hope of glory. Luther's inner joy and
deep sense of gratitude are expressed in song, praise and laughter. One can
almost see his tremendous body caught up in the ecstasy of his newly found
relation, and condition. He can be heard to say that, although he is yet a
sinner, ugly and guilty, he has been justified, forgiven "love's redeem-
ing work is done, alleluia!" Calvin is kneeling near by. His face is serene,
he is quietly and intently looking into the heavens. He puts his hands to his

10

ears and listens attentively. He is listening to a voice, a call. He nudges
Luther and says, "Martin, be still a moment. I cannot hear the voice calling
to me you are making too much noise." Then, all at once, he springs
from his knees and starts running out into the world there to live for the
glory of God. For Calvinism, salvation is always a "double grace" pardon
and power; a new condition and a new commission. With one hand man
reaches out in faith to grasp God's grace in Christ, and with the other he
reaches out to the world to grapple with its evils in love. This was Calvin's
answer to the question he asked in the sixteenth century how can and how
should a Christian live in this kind of world? Is not this the same question
that tortures us today? What answer can we give? Can such a faith as Cal-
vinism live again? Can the Church of the twentieth century once more
throw upon the heavenly screen a picture of God's inexhaustible wisdom?

11

A COMMITMENT THAT COSTS

By Richard Bass

Text: So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has
cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:33.

A Communist, writing for the French Communist papers, said, "The
Gospel of Jesus Christ is a much more powerful weapon for the renewal of
society than is our Marxist doctrine. All the same we will beat you. We
Communists do not play with words. Of our salaries we keep only what is
strictly necessary; the rest we give for propaganda purposes. You Christians
give only a little time and hardly any money for spreading the Gospel of
Christ. Believe me, it is we who will win, for we believe in our Communist
message and are ready to sacrifice everything, even our lives. But you
you are afraid to soil your hands." How many times have we heard such
words as these! Perhaps we have grown weary hearing this comparison
between the growth of Communism and the growth of Christianity. Yet
there is a haunting sentence here when the Communist says, "We Communists
do not play with words."

As I studied this passage of Scripture I had to admit that at times I have
played with the words of my Lord. This is a startling, shocking passage
when we consider it. We usually think of Jesus as the Prince of Peace, the
Good Shepherd, the Saviour of sinners. And He is. But He is more. The
same Jesus who said, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden",
also said, "I came not to bring peace but a sword". The same Jesus who
said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me", also drove the money
changers out of the temple with a whip. The same Jesus who said, "By this
shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love one for another",
also said, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother and
wife and children and brothers and sisters, yea, and even his own life, cannot
be my disciple".

Perhaps we have such Scripture verses as these to shake us out of our
complacency. We love to put people in categories and give them certain
labels. Then we have them pegged and we do not have to bother them
any more. You cannot do that with Jesus Christ. He is greater than all our
words and cannot be contained within any system or mold. He is the Lord
of all. He stands above all and judges all. As the brilliant German preacher
Thielicke says, "The life of Jesus is like a diamond whose facets glisten with
familiar and unfamiliar lights, sending out to our wondering eyes mysterious
rays in ever new refractions."

Let us look more closely at the words of this Scripture passage. "If any
man comes to me and hates not his father, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
Surely our Lord did not mean that we are to hate our family. What does

Dr. Richard Bass is on the Faculty of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary,
Mexico City, Mexico. This address was delivered in the Chapel of Columbia The-
ological Seminary on the occasion of the visit of the Seminary Choir from Mexico.
Dr. Bass is an alumnus of Columbia Seminary.

12

He mean? Is this not a Easterner's way of expressing things in the most
vivid language possible? Christ is teaching us here that the love we have for
Him must exceed all earthly ties. We must love and serve Christ with a
greater devotion than we can give to anyone on this earth.

Our Lord is calling us to examine our life in its most intimate relation-
ships to see what brings us closer to Him and what separates us from Him.
Sometimes, when a person becomes a Christian, he is disowned by his family,
but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Is it possible that Satan can use the people we love most and the things
we cherish most to separate us from our commitment to Jesus Christ?

The clear meaning of this verse is that our love for Christ must exceed
that love which we have for the closest members of our family. If it does
not, Jesus says, you cannot be My disciple. Our commitment to Christ is a
commitment that costs.

Our Lord also says, "Whoever does not bear his own cross, and come
after me, cannot be my disciple." To bear a cross in the first century meant
suffering and death. What does it mean in the twentieth? So often our
problem is that we do not want to bear a cross; we would prefer to sit on a
cushion. But Christ said we must bear His cross or we cannot be His
disciples.

We have heard much of the fact of the revolution in our world. The
whole world is in a fundamental soul-shaking revolution. It seems that all
cultures have disintegrated at the same moment. Old values, meanings and
interpretations have disappeared. Nowhere is this more apparent than in
Latin America. People are grasping for a life with significance. This revo-
lution is infinitely greater than Communism, for Communism is simply a
small perversion of this revolution which attempts to ride the crest of the
wave and to use the revolution for its own end.

This is the kind of a world in which we have to bear the cross of Christ.
Should we not see this as a God-given opportunity to present the Lord of
Life who alone can give meaning and dignity to life. Should we not see this
as a God-given opportunity to present Christ as the only Saviour from sin
and the only Saviour of the world. He alone can bring peace in the midst
of the revolution.

The great Scottish preacher Murdo Ewen MacDonald says in his book,
The Vitality of Faith, that we have toned down the demands of Christ. We
need to proclaim the Christ of the New Testament in the fulness of His
stature. Yes, we need to present to a world in revolution a Christ who
demands commitment, sacrifice and suffering.

Perhaps if we look at the world in which we live our task of bearing
the cross of Christ will become clearer. If we could press into a single town
of one thousand people the present population of the world which is now
over 2 ! /2 billion this is what we would see. Sixty people in the town would
represent the United States' population. All the others would be represented
by 940. The 60 Americans would have half of the total income of the entire
town; the remaining 940 would share the other half. In the town about 300
people would be Christians, 700 would not. 303 would be white; 697
colored. The sixty Americans would have a life expectancy of 70 years;
all the other 940 would have a life expectancy under 40 years. Literally,
most of the non-American people in the town would be poor, hungry, sick
and ignorant. The startling tragic fact is that the 60 Americans would be

13

mortally afraid of the 940 and they would be spending $850 per person to
defend themselves in the event of war, and they would be spending $3.50
a year to help give the others the message of Christ.

Does this not say much to us concerning our responsibility to bear the
cross of Christ? In a world where two-thirds of the people are not Chris-
tians we have a great responsibility to proclaim the Gospel of Christ to all
men. In a world where there is hunger, suffering and need we must, as
Christians, respond to that need. Have we been playing with the words of
our Lord?

I often think of the parable of the last judgment in Matthew chapter
twenty-five. All the people of the world are gathered before our Lord.
Those who think they are going into heaven are rejected. Those who enter
heaven are amazed to hear Jesus say, "I was hungry and you gave me food,
I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
I was sick and in prison and you visited me." They are amazed saying they
have never done that to Christ. Our Lord says, "Truly, I say to you, as you
did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me."

Does this parable not teach us that as a direct, natural result of our com-
mitment to Christ we will minister to those in need? No man can be a
Christian without being concerned for those who are in need. Bearing the
cross of Christ means we must minister to the world about us with its great
need.

What do the verses mean which deal with the man building a tower with-
out counting the cost, or the man going to war against a stronger force.
Surely, in this context, it means that our Lord is calling us to think about
our commitment. If we are not willing to go all the way then it is better not
to begin. There is no room for half-hearted commitment. Christ does not
want lukewarm followers. Our Lord is saying to us, If you cannot give Me
your love and devotion that surpasses any allegiance you have on earth, and
if you cannot bear My cross then it is better not to come after Me. He is say-
ing, I want men who are committed and whose love for Me surpasses all
earthly ties and bonds.

John Mackay has a striking phrase that he uses to describe American
Society. He calls it the "great cult of the uncommitted". There is a vast gap
between our knowledge and our action. It is also true of the Christian
Church. We know the demands of our Lord but there is a big gap between
the words of our Lord and our daily actions.

Once, someone was talking to a great scholar about one of his students.
He said that the young man had told him he was one of his students. The
teacher answered devastatingly, "He may have attended my lectures, but he
was not one of my students." It is the great tragedy of the Church that there
are so many followers but very few real disciples. We accept with our minds
but deny with our lives.

Let me end by saying we have a great need in Mexico for Christian
workers. We need men who are committed to Jesus Christ and who are will-
ing to bear His cross there. We need men who have renounced all so that
they can be the disciples of Jesus Christ.

What we are doing in Mexico is relatively insignificant. But Christ is at
work there. The winds of the Spirit of God are blowing upon the sails of
the Mexican Church. Christ will build His Church there.

14

"LORD OF THE FLIES"

By Harry Beverly

Genesis 3:1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild
animal that the Lord God had made.

Genesis 3:4 The serpent said, "You will not die. For God knows
that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like
God, knowing good and evil."

1. The first reason why we should read this book is that this is the book
people are reading today. This is not to say it is necessarily the book people
ought to be reading but, since they are, it is a book we ought to read. Time
magazine estimated this year that the book has become the most influential
novel among U. S. undergraduates since Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and
it is on the required reading list of 100 campuses. Life magazine wrote that
"more than 800,000 paperbacks have been sold, and the novel has been
argued about by at least five million young people". These figures indicate
that for millions of persons this novel speaks realistically about the world in
which we live. It would be a horrible misconception to think that we may
preach the Word and be totally oblivious to the Weltanschauung in which
we live. To preach the Word in a vacuum would be to prostitute the very
meaning of proclamation.

2. The second reason why we ought to concern ourselves with this
novel is because it is written by a sensitive artist. Wordsworth defined a poet
as "a man speaking to men, endowed with more lively sensibility, more
enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature,
and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among
mankind." He is, therefore, what John Killinger has called, "the very nervous
system of the body of humanity." Killinger concludes, in his Failure of
Theology in Modern Literature, '"therefore, theology can't afford to be out
of touch with him." "When the Church fails to listen to contemporary art, it
usually misses the temper and mood of humanity and loses its opportunity to
deal with the needs of man at the point where it might most readily have
entered into them." T. S. Eliot calls him, "the catalyst whose presence trans-
mutes the passions of man into verbal experience". Hence, theology cannot
fail to enter into dialogical relationship with the arts.

3. The third reason why this work demands our serious attention is be-
cause William Golding is an artist who sees his task as primarily religious.
He calls himself a moralist first and an artist second. Golding wrote of the
novelist, "His job is to scrape the labels off things, to take nothing for
granted, to show the irrational where it exists." "Man," says Golding, "has
grown away both from nature and himself; he has become his own God.
Nothing can touch him." Hence Golding has made it his task to break down
these false illusions. His creed is that of the Delphic Oracle "Know Your-

The Reverend Harry Beverly recently secured his doctorate from the University of
Basel. He is Assistant Professor of Apologetics. This extended Review was deliv-
ered at the Seminary for the Society for Theological Scholarship.

15

self." His writing about schoolboys, whom he knows so well from his many
years as a schoolmaster, is for him a simple means of x-raying contemporary
human nature. He sees, as the only hope for humanity, "self-knowledge at-
tained and practised by the individual". In an interview in America, Golding
stated that "the basic problem of modern humanity is that of learning to
live fearlessly with the natural chaos of existence, without forcing artificial
patterns on it . . . The difference between being alive and being an inorganic
substance is just this proliferation of experience, this absence of pattern".

Golding clarified his position as a novelist with regard to political "in-
volvement" and modern scientific discoveries: "Current affairs are only ex-
pressions of the basic human condition where his true business lies. If he has
a serious, an Aeschylean pre-occupation with the human tragedy, that is
only to say that he is committed to looking for the root of the disease instead
of describing the symptoms. I can't help feeling that critics of this Aeschylean
outlook are those who think they have an easy answer to all problems simply
because they have never looked further than the rash appearing on the
skin. They want Gulliver to declare himself for one end or other of the egg.
As for awareness of recent discoveries in biology, astronomy and psychology,
it is a necessary part of any man's equipment. But to be aware of dis-
coveries need not mean that we over-rate their importance need not mean
that we should picture our flesh under the electron microscope when our
real job is to show it sub specie aeternitatis . . ."

Golding calls himself a religious novelist and sees as his central theme
not the relationship of man to man but of man, the individual, to the uni-
verse, and through the universe, to God. While Golding calls himself a
Deist, paradoxically the whole moral framework of his novels is conceived
in terms of traditional Christian symbolism. He resolves the paradox for
himself in two ways. In the first place, a novelist with a fundamental moral
problem to communicate must be understood by his audience; and to be
understood he must use symbols which are familiar and can be readily
apprehended. An example of this is Golding's moral axiom that man and
man alone introduced evil into the world. In order to communicate, the
doctrine of Original Sin works nicely for those, in Mueller's words, "nur-
tured on the Old Testament prophets, Paul, Augustine, and Calvin". To a
critic who suggested that good was equally an exclusive human concept,
Golding replied, "Good can look after itself. Evil is the problem." Secondly,
Golding resolves the paradox by seeing himself as a man in search of cos-
mological truth; and he argues "the names, the labels, do not matter. It
is only the ultimate reality that counts and must at all costs be communi-
cated."

In an interview recorded by the New Republic, Golding was asked:
"Some people find the difference between you and Salinger to be representa-
tive of the classical difference between those who see men as basically good
that is perfectable and those who see him as evil, condemned to his
own frailties. Do you agree?" To which he replied: "I'm not saying anyone
is evil. I set out to discover whether there is that in man which makes him
do what he does, that's all. When I was young, before the war, I did have
some airy-fairy views about man, though I wasn't a Marxist (you'll find that
the Marxists are the only people left who think humanity is perfectable). But

16

I went through the war and that changed me. The war taught me differently
and a lot of others like me."

Significant is Golding's explanation for the popularity of Lord of The
Flies: "Perhaps it is because I don't make any excuses for sociey. The
youngsters like that."

The work is a modern fable or allegory; i. e., an apparently straight-
forward story that is actually multi-radiant in meaning. This is a difficult
undertaking for any contemporary author since, "the 20th Century reader
does not, in contrast to the medieval audience, expect every incident or object
to have spiritual significance or symbolic importance". As Cox, in the Critical
Quarterly, has written, "A modern audience will accept the underlying mean-
ings only if they are conveyed in a completely convincing, true to life, series
of events, as in Camus' The Plague". So the task before Golding was to find
an exciting plot which was both credible and capable of allegorical inter-
pretation. He decided upon the idea of dropping his boys on an island
obviously at the suggestion of and in reaction to the classic example of such
a book, R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857). This is a book which
deals with a favorite subject in children's literature : castaway children
assuming adult responsibilities without adult supervision. Since Golding ex-
pects his readers to recall this book, and throughout refers indirectly and di-
rectly to this book, and since Golding obviously intends to wield a stick
sharpened on one end on the Ballantyne myth, a brief glance at The Coral
Island is appropriate, if not imperative.

The Coral Island was published a century ago, in 1857, at the high tide
of Victorian self-confidence. It is permeated with smug national complacency,
synthetic missionary fervor, and a paralysing condescension. Three boys are
shipwrecked somewhere in the South Seas Jack, 8; Ralph, 15; and Peterkin
Gay, 13. Jack is a natural leader, but both Ralph and Peterkin (a comic) have
abilities valuable for survival. Jack has the most common sense and fore-
sight, but Peterkin turns out to be adept at killing pigs, and Ralph, an expect
navigator. The boys' life on the island is beautiful and they are without
malice or wickedness. The problem of evil is raised, but none is found in
the boys' own natures, rather it comes to them from the outside world. Bad
men invade their tropical paradise from the non-Christian world e.g., the
island is visited by cannibals savagely pursuing one another, who fight a cruel
and bloody battle, observed by the horrified boys, and then go away. The
Island is again visited by pirates (white men who have renounced their
Christian heritage), who capture Ralph. In due time, the pirates are de-
servedly destroyed, and in the final episode of the book the natives undergo
an unmotivated conversion to Christianity, which affects a total change in
their nature, just in time to rescue the boys. The book ends with the burning
of the false gods of Mango, and then hurrah for dear old England. "The
social and moral scale of things is clearly delineated: Britons come at the
top of it, savages and pigs at the bottom."

A century after Ballantyne, William Golding, a decade after the war,
constructs a picture of a more realistic Coral Island. In the light of a
radically altered anthropology, Coral Island is revisited by 50 or 60 small
boys. An atomic war drops them from an air crash in which the adults have
killed one another. At the story telling level, the plot is a gradual reversion
of the boys from British schoolboys who chanted hymns and "who had

17

said, 'Sir, yes, Sir' and worn caps and crosses" to savages who chanted, "Kill
the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!" and wore paint and carried a
stick sharpened at both ends and "the remains of a pair of spectacles".

At first civilized standards are imposed. A leader is democratically
elected, a meeting place for discussion is designated, and a conch-shell is
used to summon them for meetings. But gradually 20th Century civilization
is erased from their consciousness. First come irrational fears. Then the boys
split into the hunters and those struggling to retain the remnants of civiliza-
tion. The hunters become barbaric savages (characteristically loathing and
despising those who will not join them) and of the three who hold out, two
are killed and a third saved only by the arrival of the Navy, attracted there
not by signal fires for rescue, but by a barbaric blaze to destroy.

Hence, Golding adds to Ballantyne's Coral Island the one element which
boys in adventure stories never have evil; the will to destroy, and it pro-
duces a contrast at every point. The naivete of Ballantyne, originally shared
by Ralph, is now represented only by the naval officer who has not yet seen
the heart of darkness in man's heart "I should have thought that a pack
of British boys you're all British, aren't you? would have been able to
put up a better show than that I mean jolly good show. Like the Coral
Island." And while Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the officer "allowed
his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance". So much for the story
and the destruction of the Coral Island.

Now the task is before us to attempt to interpret some of the symbolism
which Golding uses in an attempt "to trace (in the author's words) the defects
of society back to the defects of human nature" and to enable us to behold in
horror the shape of unrighteousness which resulted from the ethical de-
generation of 50 boys between the ages of 6 and 12. For them the Cross
could be discarded as part of the costume of a forgotten civilization which
had taught them to strike matches (but they had none) and lingered for
awhile in thoughts of jets, TV sets and submarines.

Someone has written concerning symbols in literature: "Good symbols
should crystallize the intangible and clarify the obscure; they function both
in plot and development and in the parabolic movement of the story." And
in the light of Golding's aim, we might all agree that his symbols are by and
large good ones, and much more than mere gimmicks.

The island itself of which Ralph said, "This belongs to us", was "boat-
shaped", obviously representing all mankind on the journey through life.
The boys, representing human nature, are placed on this island, in order
for Golding to hack his way through the facade of civilization to get to the
tangled human dilemma where man is as he really is. Their struggle is the
ancient battle between the forces of good and evil raging in every man.

The use of the conch is two-fold. First, it is a symbol of rational behavior.
Second, it is a technique to place the reader on guard. (A similar habit was
employed by Homer's heroes i.e., the boys are starting out on a primitive
path.)

The story, on one level, illustrates E. H. Robertson's epigram that "power-
ful hands are seldom pure and pure hands seldom strong". Ralph and Piggy,
representing common sense and intelligence and civilization, are over-
balanced by Jack and Roger representing totalitarianism and sadism. The
moral is that the former will inevitably be overthrown in society by the latter.

18

This is the more obvious lesson to be learned from the story naked, ruthless
power, in the police or military force, if not restrained by civil authority,
because of the people's easy willingness to be ruled, will gradually absorb the
whole society and turn it into a police state annihilating what it cannot
absorb into itself. Yet, even the evil of Jack and Roger is inadequate. Jack
(perhaps representing also absolute evil) shows himself as a child before the
superior power of civilization and the British Navy. In any case, evil had
almost destroyed itself, and would have, had not the savages been rescued
from their own fires.

But, on a deeper level, the growth of savagery in all the boys (except
Simon) through the six hunts which become increasingly terrifying from
pig to Ralph is but setting forth the doctrine of original sin or the problem
of evil. Naturally, this is not the first time this technique has been applied.
Conrad's haunting Heart of Darkness forces us to face the fact that a "civil-
ized man" could become a barbaric head-hunter in his portrayal of the dark
heart of a hollow man. "Mistah Kurtz he dead."

The theme was further developed by T. S. Eliot in 1925: "We are the
hollow men/Leaning together/In this hollow valley/This broken jaw of our
lost kingdoms/In this last of meeting places/We grope together/ And avoid
speech/Gathered on this beach of the tumid river/Sightless, unless/The eyes
reappear/The hope only/Of empty men/This is the way the world ends/
This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a
bang but a whimper."

And Golding simply repeats and expands the hollow men to hollow boys
in order that we all might avoid speech gathered on this beach of the tumid
river. "Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt (or a whimper)
traveled sideways from the rock and landed across that square red rock in
the sea. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh and the body of
Piggy was gone. This time the silence was complete. Ralph's lips formed a
word but no sound came." Finally, the whimper "Ralph wept for the end
of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall . . ." In the words of
Eliot, "Between the essence and the descent/Falls the shadow." The fires,
representing generic prayer, went out.

On this deeper level, there are three major symbols: Simon, the beast,
and the Lord of the Flies.

1 ) First, the beast. This is probably Golding's most effective symbol. At
first the beast is nothing more than a symbol for the boys' primitive fears.
Later, the beast becomes man in the corpse of an airman. This incarnation
was crucial to complete the shape of the beast, for what the boys fear
is actually themselves. This theme is developed nicely. As the children of
light begin to be separated from the children of darkness Ralph seeks to
understand why "things are breaking up. We began well; we were happy.
And then people began getting frightened." Piggy later tries to analyze their
fear of a beast. "Course, there isn't a beast in the forest. How could there be?
What would a beast eat?" "Pig." "We eat Pig." "Piggy!" "I know there isn't
no beast not with claws and all that, I mean but I know there isn't no
fear either unless we get frightened of people."

Of course it is only Simon who is able to grasp the real truth. "Maybe
there is a beast. What I mean is maybe it's only us." "However Simon
thought of the beast, there arose before his inward sight the picture of a

19

human at once heroic and sick." In a recent interview Golding made explicit
this last statement by Simon. He described the body on the mountain as rep-
resenting "history, the past."

2) Second, the Lord of the Flies. Jack, whose instinct told him that the
beast must be reconciled, erected a pole in the forest with a pig's head stuck
on top for an offering. This presents the second major symbol. Naturally, it
is Simon who comes upon the head, buzzing with flies and immediately
knows what it is. The rather complicated equation here is Baalzebub was
the Philistine Lord of the Flies; the Jews transmuted his name to mean Lord
of Dung or filth; by the time of the New Testament he was Lord of the
Devils, a generalized Satan. And it is with such a one that the most signifi-
cant part of the book deals in the interview between Simon and Satan in
which the problem of evil is dealt with by Golding: "Aren't you afraid of
me?" asked the Lord of the Flies. "Simon shook." "There isn't anyone to
help you. Only me. And I'm the Beast." "Fancy thinking the Beast was some-
thing you could hunt and kill." "You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you.
Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they
are? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this Is-
land. Understand? We are going to have fun on this Island! So don't try it on,
my poor misguided boy, or else or else we shall do you. See? Jack and
Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph. Do you see?"
In other words, it is man who creates his own hell, his own devils; the evil
is in him for Golding.

3 ) Finally, the third major symbol Simon, representing Simon Peter or
Stephen or the Christ figure or Becket or St. Joan or the mystic. In
my opinion, Golding never knew how to create a realistic Simon. Perhaps his
lack of a Christology was the reason for his inability to produce a
whole Simon. Nevertheless, for Golding's purpose, Simon works fairly well.
Simon, after his interview with the Lord of the Flies, who reveals the truth
about man to him, and hints at a Christology, climbs the hill and sees the
rotting corpse for what it is, "the Beast was harmless and horrible; and the
news must reach the others as soon as possible." But the frenzied hunters will
not listen to him (although Ralph remembers bits of information) : they tear
him limb from limb in a ritual orgy.

The actual effect of Simon's act freed the Beast or Airman and he was
carried out to sea. But the mediating or redemptive effect of Simon's death
seems short-lived and ineffectual. In other words, for Golding, man cherishes
his guilt, his fears, his taboos, and will crucify any saint or redeemer who
offers to relieve him of his burden by telling the simple truth. In the words
of Shaw, "It is much safer to be a conqueror than a saint." Or in the words
of one reviewer, "Man's heart is dark, and no innocence lies beneath the sun;
or if it does, it must, inevitably, suffer and die as Piggy and Simon died,
their wisdom and virtue destroyed by the Beast's devotees."

Those of us who have been witnesses to the events of the 20th Century
are probably not shocked overtly by Golding's study of sin. Truly, in the
words of Karl Jaspers, "August 1914 is the axial date in modern Western
history, and once past it we are confronted with the present-day world." The
events of late seem more to over-shadow Golding's darkness than confirm his
picture although actually they do both. Horses, dogs, guns, bombs, and the
shot heard around the world all add their testimony to its truth. But probably

20

nothing provides quite so eloquent a confirmation of this work as the New
York Times' article, recently posted in a classroom. "The Senate Republican
whip, recently charged that right-wing extremists do the 'devil's work' expert-
ly. In a major floor speech Kuchel excoriated the John Birch Society as 'the
fright pedlers' ". The senator said 10% of his mail now consists of "fright
mail" which accuses him of treason (penalty is death) because he does not
believe the wild stories told him by the right-wingers. One letter told him
"there are African Negro troops who are cannibals stationed in Georgia''.
Another spoke of "16,000 African soldiers, complete with nose and ear-
rings". One Georgia newspaper heard of charges about Operation Water
Moccasin and concluded, "They were hysteria, the result of a sick mind,
carried away by self -induced hallucinations."

But to return more specifically to this work, William Barrett has written,
"Modern art is a product of bourgeois society in the state of dissolution." Or
in words of Yeats, "Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all
ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." Just as existentialism
is "the philosophy of the atomic age" (Barrett), so this frightened and fright-
ening age "projects its own image of man into its art, bringing to conscious-
ness all that is dark and questionable in his existence". "And as such it is
an authentic expression of our own contemporary experience." (Barrett)

On the other hand, Barth rises to remind us "that it is only in the existence
of Jesus Christ that sin is revealed" (IV-1, 403) and "that man is corrupt
(IV-2, 379) even in the knowledge of his corruption." Again, Barth has
warned us, "it is not enough merely to reflect on the incapacity and impo-
tence of man. This will simply give rise to some form of determinism." Or,
as Hordern has warned, "We must be careful in arguing too easily from the
woes of the world to the Christian doctrine of sin. In no sense do the prob-
lems of our times prove the doctrine of sin. For the Christian doctrine of sin
is not a sociological or psychological analysis of man's life."

Therefore, we must not make Golding do for us more than he can. We
do not turn to Golding to learn what sin is. Golding's doctrine of sin is more
a pessimistic reaction to the sorry events of "two world wars, the rise of
totalitarianism, the great depression, the Korean incident, the slaughter of
six million Jews, the cold war, the threat of atomic destruction, and racial
discrimination."

Inded, the 20th Century is producing art which probes many times more
deeply than does Christian theology into man's estrangement, anxiety, and
guilt herein is our indictment but it would be naive to suppose that we
can find the Christian doctrine of sin in William Golding. We find a pessi-
mistic and cynical view of human nature which speaks to our age. He uses
Christian symbols to spell out his analysis of mankind's problem. And for-
tunately he suggests no pseudo-cure. The only solution he offers is to take
the boys down into a submarine engaged in a savage pursuit of men. There
is no hope in man he cannot regulate, manipulate, or educate his fellowman
and attain Coral Island. For Golding, the war turned man out of the garden
of Coral Island and his nature stands guard to prevent his return.

21

COVENANT OR CONTRACT?

Some Reflections on Reformed and Scottish Theology

By James Torrance

James Denney, who was one of the great theologians of our church in
Scotland at the turn of the century, used to say that in a living church all
our evangelists should be theologians and all our theologians evangelists. That
is an ideal to which our church in Scotland has often aspired, but which it
has perhaps too seldom realized. When we think of some of the great names
of our church John Knox, John Welch, Robert Bruce of Kinnaird, Samuel
Rutherford, David Dickson, James Durham, Thomas Boston, Ralph and
Ebenezer Erskine after whom Erskine College was called, James Frazer of
Brea, John McCleod Campbell and many others, we can soon discover that
their work was characterized by a clear grasp of the gospel of grace, a burn-
ing desire to be faithful to that gospel. These men were theologians and
evangelists.

All through history the church has had to contend for the gospel of
grace. Influences have always emerged in the history of the church which
have tended to obscure the evangel. But under God, time and again, men
have arisen to summon the church back to her true foundations. We think
of Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and countless others.
In this lecture, I shall endeavor to illustrate this by certain considerations
about the meaning of the word "covenant" and by certain reflections on our
own tradition in Scottish theology.

The word "covenant" is clearly one of the great words of the Bible. We
read of God making a covenant with Abraham and renewing it at Sinai, of
David making a covenant with Jonathan, of kings making covenants for their
people. Jeremiah tells his people of a day when God will fulfill His promises
in a new covenant. In the New Testament, Jesus is Mediator of the New
Covenant. Likewise, in our Scottish history, we read about national covenants,
the Solemn League and Covenant. We read about bands and pacts where a
nation or a general assembly or a congregation enter into covenant with God.
We read of men like Thomas Boston, Ebenezer Erskine, Adam Gibb, and
others, making their own personal covenants with God, with Jesus Christ.

What do we mean by a "covenant"? Let me suggest a possible defiinition.
A covenant is a promise where two people or two parties bind themselves
together to love one another unconditionally. Perhaps the simplest example
of that is marriage. The bride and bridegroom "promise and covenant" to be
a loving, faithful, and dutiful husband or wife. The word "covenant" was
first used in the English marriage service in 1549, signifying that the two
people mutually bind themselves together in a relationship of love. After the
vows the ring is given as a sign of the covenant. "By this sign you take each
other to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for

The Reverend James Torrance is Lecturer in Theologv in the University of Edin-
burgh, and will be a Guest Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary in the
Spring Quarter 1965. This lecture was delivered in the Chapel of the Seminary.

22

richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and cherish till death do
you part." What does that mean? It means in a phrase that that ring is a
sign that they promise to love one another unconditionally. The man does not
promise that he will love his wife on the condition that he has enough money
to support her or on the condition that she keeps good health! No, he prom-
ises to love her unconditionally. Take another example. Suppose, in the
course of your ministry, two neighbors have a violent quarrel, and go to law
with one another. After a time, one of them comes to you and asks you to
help them effect a reconciliation. You listen to both parties and endeavor to
say to them: "You have to forgive and forget". But back comes the reply,
"Well, I'll forgive him IF he gives me a written apology"; or "IF he says he's
sorry." The moment you hear that big word IF you know perfectly well they
are not going to forgive one another. What do you say? "Listen, you have to
forgive your neighbor whether or not he says he's sorry", because forgiveness
is a form of love and all real love is in fact unconditional. There is no
such thing as conditional love. If somebody says, "I shall love so-and-so on
the condition . . .", that person doesn't know what love means.

This is what makes a covenant so different from a contract. What do we
mean by a contract? A contract is a legal relationship binding two people or
two parties together on mutual conditions to achieve some future result. For
example, I might make an agreement where I say: "IF I put down $1,000
and IF you put down $ 1 ,000 then we'll bind ourselves together in law to do
this job together." We make promises binding ourselves on mutual condi-
tions. We enter into an agreement, a contract, a compact, with one another,
with some future situation in mind.

In the Bible there are many kinds of covenant (cf. the article by Menden-
hall in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible on "Covenant"). There are
covenants between equals as between David and Jonathan, and there are
covenants between unequals as when kings made covenants for their people.
The important thing to notice is that in God's dealings with men, God's
dealings are always those of a covenant and never those of a contract. They
have their source in the loving sovereign heart of God. God conceives the
covenant, God announces it, God confirms it and establishes it. It is God
who carries it through to fulfillment and the motive in the heart of God is
love. The form of the covenant is: "I will be your God and you shall be My
people." So God makes His covenant for us in Jesus Christ.

Let us notice three things about a covenant before we move on to his-
torical considerations. Firstly, God's covenant is a covenant of grace, not
conditioned by anything in me, in man. It is unconditional and uncondi-
tioned. That was the lesson that Israel had to learn in the Old Testament.
Why has God called us to be His elect people? they asked. Back came the
reply of the prophet: "Not because you are more in number than anybody
else." Don't think it is because you are better than the other nations that God
has called you. God called you in spite of the fact that you are a stiff-necked
people. God loves you because He loves you. Again, this is the message that
emerges in Paul's Epistles. God's grace is an unmerited grace, not condi-
tioned by anything in us. The very meaning of the word grace is that God in
His love has given Himself to us in Christ. He makes a covenant of grace.

But secondly, God's covenant of grace nevertheless demands a response.
When I became engaged to be married, my love for my wife was not condi-

23

tioned by the tact that I thought she possibly first loved me or that she was
making certain approaches towards me. Not at all. It was the other way
around. I loved her and my love, I suppose, evoked a response. It certainly
demanded one! Without her response my love would have never led to the
joys of homelife and marriage. So it is with the grace of God. Although it is
not conditioned by anything in us God's unconditional covenant nevertheless
demands a response of faith, repentance, obedience and love. Without the
response of faith no man can see God and enjoy the blessings of the covenant.
The New Testament does not say He loved us because he foreknew that we
would love Him. It says we love Him because He first loved us. "Herein is
love not that we loved God but that He loved us and gave His Son to be the
propitiation for our sins." You see, God has made His great decision for us
in Jesus Christ, but God waits to hear the Amen of our faith to His cove-
nant. By grace, by God's covenant love, are you saved through faith. God's
covenant demands a response.

Thirdly, the sin of the Pharisees in the New Testament and it is the sin
of the heart in all ages was to turn God's covenant of grace into a contract,
to turn it inside out. For example, God says to Israel at Mt. Sinai: "I have
loved you, I have called you, I have brought you up out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage. I am your God. Therefore, thou shalt have no
other gods before me." In the words of Jesus, "if you love Me, keep My
commandments." In the jargon of today, the indicative is prior to the im-
perative. "I have loved you, I have redeemed you. Therefore, do this", is the
form of the covenant. But the Jews turned it the other way around, and said:
"If you keep the ten commandments, then God will love you. If you keep the
sabbath day perfectly, then the kingdom of God will come. Do this and if
you do it, then God will . . ." They wanted to make the imperative prior to
the indicative. They wanted to turn God's covenant of grace into a contract
of merit, so tha men could bargain with God by feeling that they had full-
filled the conditions of the contract. In this way, God would be obliged to do
something for them. But, as Paul argues in his letters, this is a misunder-
standing of the relationship between gospel and law. In Galatians, Chapter 3,
we read that God made His covenant with Abraham, giving him the prom-
ises of grace, and alhough the law came 430 years later, it didn't turn the
covenant into a contract.

We might illustrate the same point by an example. Suppose I promise to
give my little boy a bicycle. I say, "Alan, I'm going to give you a bicycle for
your next birthday." Then suppose that some weeks later I say, "Alan, by the
way, do you remember I promised you a bicycle? Well, I'll give it to you
if you promise to weed the garden and clean out your toy cupboard." I begin
to impose conditions. What would he say? "Daddy, you have broken your
promise", and he would be right. This is Paul's argument, is it not, in Gala-
tians, Chapter 3?

What happened already among the Jews, has happened in all ages in the
history of the church. Men have always wanted to turn God's covenant of
grace into a contract. And perhaps at no point is this more clear than when
we consider the meaning of the word "repentance". We would say that a
man who commits sins ought to repent of his sins and come back to God
and receive God's forgiveness. Likewise, if he is really repentant, there
should be godly sorrow, and a willingness to confess his sin. Furthermore he

24

must turn over a new leaf, and make amends by doing good deeds. Where
such repentance is clearly evident, the penitent is surely entitled to receive
the word of forgiveness. Now it was out of considerations precisely like
that, that there emerged the medieval doctrine of the sacrament of penance.
The medieval church said there are three parts to repentance; contrition of
heart, contritio; confession to the priest as the outward sign of contrition,
confessio; and then a willingness to effect a change of conduct, satisf actio.
When a man has fulfilled these conditions of contrition, confession and
satisfaction, then he is entitled to receive Christ's word of forgiveness and
absolution at the mouth of Christ's servant, the priest. By the sixteenth cen-
tury and the time of the Protestant Reformation, the sacrament of penance
had developed many excesses. But when John Calvin came to look at it, he
saw straightaway that what was wrong was that it had made forgiveness
conditional on repentance. At the heart of the sacrament of penance, for
all its other mistakes, it said, "If you repent then you will be forgiven. Do
this, confess your sins, make this outward change, and if you do this then
God will forgive you". The imperative was made prior to the indicative.
Forgiveness was conditioned by repentance. Do this and then God will . . .
But, as Calvin pointed out, it is the other way round. Forgiveness is logically
prior to repentance. What Calvin had in mind was something like this. When,
by the Spirit of God, we become aware of what God has done for us in Jesus,
then there is evoked within us a response of faith and repentance. It is the
goodness of God that leads us to repentance. God's grace is not conditioned
by our repentance, but our repentance is our response to the gospel of
grace, which evokes it and makes it possible.

Let me put it this way. It may be that we tend to think of repentance too
subjectively, as a matter of feeling sorry for sin, of our confessing it and
renouncing it. Calvin was really making a plea, it seems to me, for a more
objective understanding of the nature of repentance. One might illustrate
it this way. Let us suppose that I had the misfortune to have a quarrel with
one of you, and we became estranged from one another. Then one day I
come to you and say, in all sincerity, "I forgive you." What would that
mean? It would not only be a token of affection and a desire for reconcilia-
tion, but also an act of condemnation. I would be saying, in that very word.
"You are the guilty party, it was your wrong deed that led to the estrange-
ment and alienation." Condemnation lies at the very heart of forgiveness.
But what would this mean on the other side? You cannot accept my for-
giveness, my offer of love and reconciliation, without submitting to my
verdict. In receiving my forgiveness, you would acknowledge your guilt.
Now, is it not something like that when God speaks His great word of
grace to us in Christ? The word of the cross is at once a word of love and a
word of judgment.

When we are confronted by the Cross of Christ, in the very act of re-
ceiving the word of forgiveness, we confess that we are guilty. It was for
our sins that Christ died, and that acknowledgement is our repentance.
Forgiveness is logically (if not temporally) prior to our repentance, as the
grace of God is prior to our faith. Repentance, as our submission to the
word of the Cross, is implicit in our response of faith to the gospel of grace.
To invert that order, and make forgiveness conditional on what we do is
to turn God's covenant of grace into a contract, to make the imperative
prior to the indicative. That was why our old Scottish divines used to

25

distinguish between what they called legal repentance and evangelical re-
pentance. Legal repentance of the medieval kind said, "Do this and if you
do this then God will forgive you." Evangelical repentance sees it is only
the gospel of grace that can lead a man to repentance. So Calvin taught
that repentance, as the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, has two sides to
it mortificatio and vivificatio. Just as justification is logically prior to sali-
fication, so forgiveness is logically prior to renewal. God renews those who
are forgiven. Repentance is part of our sanctification.

Now this same issue, which was one of the great dividing points between
the Reformers and the Church of Rome, became a living issue in Scotland
150 years after the Reformation, in a very fascinating period of Scottish
church history. Towards the end of the 17th century, there came a gradual
change in Scottish Calvinist preaching. Legalism of different kinds began
to creep in. The Scottish preacher preached the law, not only as a rule of
life, but in order to bring men to conviction of sin, so that under con-
viction, they would renounce their sins and turn in penitence to the gospel.
Where they showed signs of real penitence, (and in cases of discipline
could "satisfy the kirk"), they could receive the word of grace and the
word of forgiveness. In a strange way, in the course of 150 years, the
covenant was being turned into a contract, right in the heart of Scottish
Calvinism.

The theological implications of such preaching came out to the surface
in something that happened in one of our presbyteries in Scotland. The
Presbytery of Auchterarder in Perthshire raised the matter in the year 1717,
when they inserted the following clause into one of the articles for trials
for license. "I believe it is not sound or orthodox to teach that we must for-
sake sin in order to come to Christ, and to be instated in covenant with
God." This, of course, as Thomas Boston and others of the day pointed out,
was unfortunately worded. But at heart it was a concern to recover the
evangelical understanding of repentance of Calvin and the Reformers and
the earlier Scottish divines. One of the students refused to subscribe to the
clause, and appealed to the general assembly of 1717. The general assembly
supported the plea of the student and condemned the Presbytery in no un-
certain terms, declaring the proposition to be unsound and most detestable.

But the significance of the so-called "Auchterarder creed", as it was
called, and the controversy it triggered off, is that it brought to light the
extent to which legalism and a kind of rationalistic moralism had pervaded
our church. Referring to this decision of the Assembly, Ralph Erskine,
preaching in his pulpit in Dunfermline, could say, "Some speak of for-
saking sin in order to and before coming to Christ. But never will you for-
sake sin evangelically until once Christ comes to you and you come to
Him. When Christ comes into the temple He drives out all the buyers and
the sellers. Therefore, let Christ in and He will make the house clean".

Another person who sat through that general assembly of 1717 and who
strongly protested against its decision was another of our great theologians,
Rev. Thomas Boston of Ettrick, of the parish of Simprin in the lowlands
of Scotland. Sometime before, Thomas Boston, in the course of his pastoral
ministry, came across a remarkable little book in the home of one of his
parishioners, entitled The Marrow of Modern Divinity, a book written in
England 70 years before in 1645 during the Westminster Assembly by a
man called Edward Fisher. The reading of this book made an enormous

26

impression upon Boston. It opened his mind to the understanding of the
gospel of grace. It made the same kind of impact upon many minds in Scot-
land that Martin Luther's commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians has
made on many another in the history of the Church. The book was, in
essence, a reaffirmation of the central doctrines of grace taught by Luther
and Calvin and the early reformers. After the general assembly decision,
Boston handed his copy of The Marrow to some of his minister colleagues,
one of whom, Hog of Carnock, had it printed. This again occasioned fierce
controversy on precisely this issue Is the covenant of grace a conditional
covenant? The matter came up before the general assembly the following
year in 1719. And in the same year Principal Haddow, principal and pro-
fessor of divinity in St. Andrews, an orthodox high Calvinist, in a sermon
before the Synod of Fife, attacked the book violently. He followed his ser-
mon by publishing a tract called The Antinomianism of the Marrow De-
tected.

It is beyond our scope in this lecture to enter into the details of what
came to be known in Scotland as the Marrow Controversy. But the general
assembly, in the so-called "Black Act of 1720", condemned the book, pro-
hibited ministers from recommending it and enjoined ministers to warn
their people against it an astonishing illumination of the change that had
taken place in the Calvinism of the day. The central issue was whether re-
pentance and faith and holiness are conditions of the covenant of grace.
This, the Marrow-men, as they were called, denied, but the general assembly
asserted. Outstanding among the Marrow-men were such names as Thomas
Boston, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, Hog of Carnock, James Wardlaw,
and others, most of whom a few years later seceded from the Church of
Scotland.

The first secession of 1733 was primarily over the issue of patronage,
the right of a congregation to call its own minister, but there were deep-
seated theological issues. We can discern within it an evangelical concern
to return to the theology of the earlier Scottish divines and of the Reforma-
tion. These men were undoubtedly the leading evangelicals of the day in
Scotland, and they were striving to recover the gospel of grace. In a strange
way the legalism of the orthodoxy of the Scottish Calvinism of that time
was beginning to throw up its opposite in the form of what we call mod-
eratism, that kind of liberal rationalistic moralizing of the broad school
which was to be so influential in Scotland in the second half of the 18th
century, and exercise a deadening influence in the life of our church.

In reaction against the Marrow-men, ministers in Scotland began to
preach the law all the more and emphasize the need for moral reform. It
is not easy to know how far moderatism grew out of high Calvinism, or how
far it was a reaction against it. But the one lesson which I think we learn
from that period is that whenever a doctrine of conditional grace is taught,
and the emphasis begins to fall supremely on what we have to do, upon our
faith and repentance and humility, then the gospel of the grace of God, the
proclamation of what the older divines called the finished work of Christ,
begins to be pushed into the background if not to disappear.

The question at once arises, where did this doctrine of conditional grace
come from in a Calvinistic land like Scotland? It is not easy to know the
right answer. Different suggestions have been made.

27

First, some writers have suggested it came from the Arminianism of the
Episcopal period of the 17th century, when bishops were imposed on the
Scottish church during the covenanting period in Scotland. This is not very-
likely. Most of the Episcopalians of the period were, more or less, Calvinist
in their theology.

Again, secondly, there was the influence of certain forms of English
puritanism, the so-called neo-nomianism of Richard Baxter, and Daniel
Williams, whose writings were being read in Scotland, who taught that
Christ fulfilled the conditions of the old law for us, but has imposed a new
law (hence the name neo-nomian), a new law whose conditions must be
fulfilled if we are to attain evangelical righteousness. Certainly, the Marrow-
men accused the general assembly of being neo-nomian in theology.

Thirdly, we must remember that the spirit of the age in which they
lived was that of rationalism. It was the period of the enlightenment, the
renaissance, with its revival of interest in classical writings, and its new
faith in the natural powers of man. In the passing of feudalism, men sought
security in terms of social contracts.

Fourthly, I suggest that the deepest reason probably lies in what we call
the emergence of federal theology, or covenant theology, that kind of
protestant theology which developed in the 17th century and which distin-
guished different kinds of covenant and made out of these different kinds
of covenant a frame-work within which all theology was cast.

Most characteristic of this kind of theology was the hard and fast distinc-
tion between a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. What was the
significance in reformed theology of this distinction? According to the
scheme, when God made Adam and subjected him to the laws of nature
the laws of nature discernible by the natural light of reason God entered
into a covenant or shall we call it a contract? with man, that if he obeyed
the laws of God and fulfilled the conditions of this covenant he would find
eternal life. Adam, as such, was not a private individual but a public person,
the federal head of the race. Thus, when Adam disobeyed, he brought the
curse not only upon himself, but upon all those of his posterity whom he
represented. But God, in His grace, didn't destroy the human race, but
elected out of the mass of fallen mankind a number for Himself and made
a covenant of grace for these in Christ. This covenant of grace was already
promised in the proevangelism of Genesis, announced to Abraham, re-
affirmed at Mt. Sinai, and fulfilled in Christ. God, by His Spirit, effectually
calls the elect and brings them to saving faith.

This distinction between a covenant of works and a covenant of grace
was unknown to John Calvin and the Reformers. Indeed, I question whether
Calvin would have ever taught a doctrine of a covenant of works. Part of
the difficulty is that in Latin the word foedus, from which our word "federal"
comes, means both a covenant and a contract. In Scot's law to this day a
covenant and a contract mean the same thing, and we speak about "the
contracting parties" in marriage.

For Calvin, all God's dealings with men in creation and providence and
redemption are ultimately those of grace. There has only been one eternal
covenant of grace, Calvin taught in Book II of the Institutes, although there
are two different forms of this one covenant, an old and a new. In 1534
Bullinger wrote a book on The One Eternal Covenant and Testament of

28

God. Already, earlier, in 1526 Zwingli had appealed to the concept of
covenant in the defense of infant baptism. In 1584 we find Ursinus, one
of the men who helped draw up the Heidelberg Catechism, speaking of a
Foedus Naturae, a covenant of nature. Others began to speak about a
Foedus Generate.

The first person in Scotland actually to use the phrase a "covenant of
works" was Robert Rollock, the first principal of Edinburgh University. In
1596 Rollock wrote a book entitled, Some Questions and Replies About the
Covenant of God. In 1597 he followed it by another book, A Treatise on
Effectual Calling. This latter book was a treatise on systematic theology.
Section two in the first sub-section is entitled, Of the Word of God and of
God s Two Covenants Both That of Works and That of Grace.

From that time on this distinction comes to be an accepted one and out
of it there emerged that federal scheme of theology which was to dominate
Scottish theology and be regarded as orthodoxy for the next 250 years. In
1638 David Dickson expounded the theme before the General Assembly,
having already the year before written a book entitled Theurapeutica Sacra,
which was not published until 1656. David Dickson, like Samuel Ruther-
ford, distinguished three covenants: first, a covenant of redemption, between
the Father and the Son, made from all eternity, where the Son enters into
a contract with the Father that He will fulfill the conditions of the covenant
of works on behalf of the elect. Then secondly, there was the covenant of
works made between God and Adam; and thirdly, a covenant of grace made
between God and Man, by Jesus Christ the Mediator. This threefold scheme
of federal theology was set forth in a book called The Sum of Saving Knowl-
edge written by David Dickson and James Durham, and which was often
bound up with copies of the Westminster Confession and the Shorter
Catechism and widely read in Scotland.

The Westminster Confession of Faith (in sections 7 and 14) was the
first public Confession to set out the federal scheme, though in a modified
way, distinguishing a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. Similar
advocates of federal theology had been emerging elsewhere, Cocceius in
Holland, John Preston, William Ames, John Ball in England. In New Eng-
land, eight works in federal theology had appeared before 1650. In 1677
there appeared a work which was to exercise a great influence in Scotland,
by Hermann Witsius, on the Covenants.

In the heart of federal theology, as I see it, there was a deep-seated con-
fusion, between what we have called a "covenant" and a "contract". So, for
example, Ursinus defines a covenant as follows, "A covenant in general
signifies a mutual contract or agreement of two parties joined in the covenant,
whereby is made a bond or obligation on certain conditions for the per-
formance of giving or taking something, with the addition of outward signs
and tokens." A covenant is a contract with mutual conditions. Similar
definitions abound in the writings of James Dickson, Samuel Rutherford
and others. These men were evangelical theologians, but out of this language
there begins to emerge something else, in Scotland a doctrine of conditional
grace.

All these men were writing in a time when, as Perry Miller has reminded
us in his book The New England Mind, political thought patterns were
changing. With the break up of feudalism, the notions of contract, social

29

contract, legal rights, conditions of work, the liberties of the individual, etc.,
were in the air. In Scotland we read about many kinds of "bands" and
"pacts". In this way, the notion of contract was familiar. But how far did
this appeal to contractual notions influence the emergence of those brands
of Calvinism which, in spite of their professed allegiance to the doctrine of
grace, in fact obscured the gospel of grace, and brought the protests of men
like Frazer of Brea, and, much later, John McLeod Campbell. It certainly
brought the protests of the Marrow-men, like Thomas Boston and the
Erskines, who pleaded for a return to the theology of Luther and of Calvin.

By way of conclusion, let me make some comments on the significance
of this for our church life in Scotland today. I believe that throughout our
land there is a sense of weariness in our church. Christianity is regarded by
many as a burden to be carried, a yoke to be borne. Stout-hearted people
pull themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning and go down the road
and sit in a pew and listen to a sermon! The very thought of the Christian
gospel evokes for them a sense of weariness. I don't think I'm exaggerating,
I'm certain this is true. But if it is true, we are bound to ask ourselves
Why? What has gone wrong? The gospel of grace is surely a gospel of joy
and of liberty. Is it not significant that in the New Testament when the
Pharisees turned God's covenant of grace into a contract they made the
religion of Israel a yoke, grievous to be borne? It was in that context that
Jesus said, "Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I
will give you rest". I wonder if we are turning the covenant of grace into
a contract in our preaching today.

Let me illustrate briefly. Firstly, I think of certain kinds of mass evangel-
ism. Now there is certainly a place for mass evangelism in the life of the
church the gospel of grace should be preached in the market place. But
I think of an evangelist who came to one of our cities a year or two ago
(I'm not thinking of Billy Graham), and night by night he said to the
people, "Tonight you are going to make your decision for Christ. You are
going to stand up, you are going to come forward here, you are going to
give your life to Christ. And if you do that, you'll be saved!" This was the
sum of his message. But every night I went home feeling, That man has
not preached the gospel of grace. He told the people not what God had
done for them but what they were to do, and if they did it, then God would
save them. Do this, and thou shalt live! Our old Scottish divines would
have called that "legal preaching"! Was it really evangelical preaching? It
is not the preaching of the Book of Acts.

On the day of Pentecost, when Peter preached, he preached Christ. He
told the people certain things. What did he tell them? He told them what
God had done in Jesus Christ, and ended his sermon. Only when they were
under the conviction of the Spirit, when their consciences were troubled,
and they said, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" did he then tell them
what they were to do. Repent and believe and be baptized. The indicative
was prior to the imperative. The gospel of grace demands the response of
faith and repentance. It is not the other way round.

Secondly, in Scotland we have been endeavoring to teach our people
something about stewardship. But how is stewardship sometimes presented?
Sometimes it is presented in this way. We tell our people that to give one's
life to Christ is not just the experience of a meeting. They must give time,

30

talent, money, all to Christ. And then we add (or imply) "If you do this,
God will bless you." "Do this, and thou shalt live!" Is that the way to
preach stewardship? Surely it is the other way around. We should proclaim
to our people what God has done for men in Christ and then summon the
response of gratitude.

Thirdly, there are certain other voices within our church which remind
us that the gospel of Christ is the gospel of "whole salvation". This is quite
right. Christ died for the whole man and the gospel has something to say
to the whole of society. But how is this gospel of whole salvation sometimes
presented? We tell our people that to give one's life to Christ is a practical
thing they must witness where they work and get involved in their trade
unions and industry and society. And the implication is, If you do this
then you'll realize whole salvation. "Do this, and thou shalt live!" Again
the cart is put before the horse the fallacy of a hysteron-proteron.

Fourthly, great controversy has been stirred by the publication of the
book by the Bishop of Woolwich, Honest to God, with its emphasis on love
and the unconditional demands of love. In one chapter, entitled 'The Man
for Others", he attempts a reconstruction of Christology. Jesus is presented
to us as One who met the unconditional demands of love and gave His
life for others. As I look at the story of Jesus I am aware that a demand is
being made upon me that I also should be "a man for others". But is
that the gospel? It that not the law? The law of love, no doubt. There is
not a word about forgiveness in the whole book. I am thrown back upon
myself to create my own imagery of God back upon myself to form my
own patterns of morality back upon myself to meet the unconditional
demands of love. How wearisome to be thrown back always upon onself!

Finally, I venture to give another illustration. In the Highland north, in
the celebration of the communion, the ministers often follow the old prac-
tice of "fencing the tables". But how is it sometimes done? At the very
place where the bread and wine are spread before our people as the
emblems of the covenant of grace, at the very point when the minister
would be expected to say, "Take, eat . . .", what does he say? He says,
"You may come to the Lord's Table if you are truly repenant, // you re-
nounce your sins, if you do this and if you don't do that". So he fences the
table. The tragic result is that although the church is crowded, perhaps
only 15-20 people communicate. What does that mean? Is this not to turn
the sacrament of the covenant of grace into a sacrament of penance? //
you fulfill these conditions, /'/ you are worthy, then you may receive the
word of forgiveness and absolution. In the year 1215, in the Fourth Lateran
Council of the Church, the church had to order the people to come to the
sacrament of penance once a year at least because they were putting it off
to old age. So in the Highlands of Scotland today, in Calvinistic Scotland,
people put off coming to the sacrament of the Lord's Table until old age.
What does this mean? Our older divines in Scotland would have said this
is legal preaching. We tell our people what they have to do and if they do it
then God will bless them.

If this is true, what are we doing? Are we not laying a yoke on the
shoulders of our people? They come to church to be told, not what God has
done for them, but what they have got to do. How wearisome to be endlessly
"told" what you have got to do, even if it is by an evangelist! If you put a

31

yoke on the shoulders of people, what do the people want to do? They want
to throw it off. We have to ask ourselves in Scotland how far the younger
generation are doing just that. Such is the danger of preaching which is
primarily exhortation. The danger of such "legal preaching", as the Marrow-
men said long ago, is that it appeals to the wrong motives. It appeals either

to fear, or the desire for reward "fear of hell or hope of heaven". In all

true preaching of the gospel of grace, we appeal to the motives of gratitude
and love, and such preaching should evoke joy in the hearts of our people.
The Lord and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not a "contract-God", but
a God of covenant love.

32

THE GOOD SAMARITAN SPEAKS
TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

William Taliaferro Thompson

In each of the first three Gospels we are faced with the two great com-
mandments. The first, narrowly considered, deals with religion man's
relation to God. The second, so conceived, is concerned with morality
man's relation to his fellows. But our Lord never means for us to regard
them separately. He ties them together inextricably, permanently. On these
two, not on this one, hang all the law and the prophets. What God hath
joined together let no man put asunder.

True religion should issue in righteous living, and the kind of life God
demands is dependent upon our relation to Him, for guidance and strength.
George MacDonald, who meant so much to C. S. Lewis, feels this so strong-
ly that he says, "Religion and life are one thing, or neither is anything."

Against the first commandment as a background, and in the light of the
incomparable parable of the Good Samaritan, let us look at the second
commandment. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

What demand does this commandment make on us today?

Two principles, or conceptions, from the Christian point of view are
involved in the word neighbor, which, if understood and felt, will go a long
way toward helping each of us see for himself the meaning of this com-
mandment.

I. My Neighbor is a Person.

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Just as you and I are selves, so
our neighbor is a self not a machine, an automation, a robot, a thing, a
number, a case, an animal; but a person who loves and hates, fears and
hopes, knows victory and defeat, is conscious of his own value and dignity,
is bound to others by all the gracious and strong ties of blood or friendship.
This conception is not dependent on race, or occupation, or social class.
Everyone, everywhere, with whom we deal is a person, whether he is high
or low, rich or poor, labors with his mind, or with his hands, is a white
collar or a blue collar worker. The Samaritan ministered to a man of a
different race, who held a different creed, and who probably worked at a
different trade and moved on a different social level. Each man or woman
has deep in his heart a hunger to be recognized and respected as a person.
Archbishop Temple sees this clearly, "What labor is resenting," he writes,
"is not so much poverty, short of destitution, but rather the insult to the
personality of the poor man," who is treated often as if he had no human
rights. A fine Negro minister in Richmond said to me, "What my people
want is to be recognized and respected as persons."

This address was one of a series delivered by Dr. Thompson in Columbia
Presbyterian Church as part of the Seminary's Opening Exercises, shortly
before his death. Dr. Thompson was Professor of Religious Education, Union
Theological Seminary, Virginia, from 1920 to 1956.

33

And a Negro layman, much better dressed than I was, sitting opposite
to me at a luncheon, told of his experiences as a soldier in our army in Italy
during World War II. "I wasn't wounded, but I risked my life again and
again for my Country, and when I returned I wanted to be treated as a
'first-class citizen,' a term used so often. It isn't that we want to be with
the white people; but we don't want to be told we can't. Let me illustrate.
A number of us were going on the train to a convention. We were scattered
through several coaches, the train was desegregated; but as the day wore
on most of us gathered at the end of one coach because of our common
interests, and discussed our common problems. We were there because we
wanted to be there; but if we had been told we had to be there, separated
from the white people, we would have resented it, as that would have done
something to our dignity as persons."

Read the books by Lomax, Baldwin, Williams, Wright, King, or any
other Negro author, and you can't help being impressed by what segregation
does to Negroes as persons. Their inner sense of human dignity is violated.

Are we able to regard another, any one, as having dignity and worth,
except as we think of him as created by God who made him in His own
image, a living soul, and set eternity in his heart?

In his introduction to The Journal of George Fox, that great pioneer
Quaker, Norman Penney tells us that Fox felt that "there is something in
man that is not of dust, or earth, or flesh, or time, but of God. That faith
gave him an exalted sense of the infinite worth and preciousness of man, of
every man of every type and degree." Aristotle said that a slave was only
"an animated instrument, who is nothing of himself." We are apt to feel
that way about some people who are enslaved by sin or circumstance, unless
we are sure with George Fox that there is something in every man that is of
God.

We discussed at some length in a class at the seminary this matter of our
neighbor being a person. A week later one of the students, who had partici-
pated in that discussion and who had been working with under-privileged
Negro boys, told me that the afternoon before the boys had decided to play
horse and rider, and a little fellow came to him and put up his arms to be
taken upon his back. "The boy was ragged, he was dirty, his nose was runny,
he was somewhat smelly; there was a complete revulsion in my heart and I
didn't see how in the world I could touch him. Then I recalled our class
and I said to myself, 'He is a person with feelings and sensitivities like mine.
He is a person made in the image of God, whom God loves', and there was
a change in my heart and I reached out and I took him and put him upon
my back and with joy in my soul I rode him around our little yard." That
is the first truth. If I am going to witness to my neighbor, I must realize that
he is a person. When we consider our neighbor in relation to God, we find
ourselves going a step further, and thinking of him as more than just a
person. We see him as

II. Our Brother

How evident this is! When we pray The Lord's Prayer, which begins,
"Our Father Who art in heaven," we unite ourselves with God's other
children as our brothers. When we recite The Apostles' Creed, which starts,
"I believe in God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," we
declare that we are convinced that our neighbors are our brothers because

34

they, as we, are created by our common Father. We are but following Paul's
thinking, as he affirmed on Mars Hill, that "God hath made of one blood all
nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth".

But as we think of our neighbor as our brother, because he is the son
of the God Who created both of us, we find that the relationship is a much
deeper one than this. Many of our neighbors actually, and all of them poten-
tially, are our brothers for whom Christ died. There could be no closer, no
stronger relationship than this, for it is basic, everlasting.

In the picture, None But the Lonely Heart, Ernie Nott, walking with his
girl down a London alley gave a half-crown to a beggar. When she asked
him why he gave so much, he answered, "Once I saw an animal digging in
the garbage. I looked a little closer, and it was a man, I looked a little closer
still, and it was by brother." If he had looked yet closer he might have seen
the face of Christ his Elder Brother; for our Lord tells us, "Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me." Some
men have looked yet closer and found this true. Charlie Andrews, said con-
tinually of his work in India, "It is as if I saw Christ in the faces of those
I met." And Dr. Fielding, Dean of the Divinity School of Toronto Univer-
sity, tells of an old monk, who, as he left his monastery and stepped into the
city streets would say, "Jesus", as he saw anyone approaching, to remind
himself that Jesus was in that person.

It is as we regard our neighbors in their actual or potential relation to
Christ that our outlook and attitude change. Paul in Second Corinthians
tells us that as he is convinced that "One died for all", he now regards no
one from the human point of view. Or to put it a little differently, "the
human estimate of men was abolished by the cross". Is it strange that the
great Apostle writes to the Galatians, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there
is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one
in Christ Jesus". All that counted was that they were in Christ. In Him the
three great cleavages of the ancient world were bridged over, or filled up
the cleavage of race, of class, and of sex. Nothing really should separate
those who are one, brothers, in Christ. That remarkable mystic, Baron Von
Hugel, feeling this, referred to a washerwoman, "with whom he had the
honor of worshipping".

In the same spirit the venerable Dr. Greene, pastor of the famous
Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, D. C, stopped one morning, as he
was receiving people into the church, until the eye of every one in the
congregation was fixed on him. Before the pulpit stood a Chinese, a washer-
woman, and Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
the U. S. Then he said to the people, "I'll have you to note that at the foot
of the Cross the ground is level."

If we could just keep steadily in mind that people, all people, are persons,
and our brothers through Christ, what a difference it would make in our
face-to-face relations. Dick Shepherd, Rector of St. Martin's-in-the-Field,
London, must have had this in his heart when he said, "Christianity does
not consist in abstaining from doing things no gentlemen would think of;
but consists in doing things unlikely to occur to any one who is not in touch
with the spirit of Jesus Christ." Must it not be our responsibility to see that
the members of our churches understand this, and manifest in their daily
experience the spirit of Christ!

35

Then husbands and wives would live together through two-score and
more years in something of the joy and thoughtfulness that marked their
courtship days. May I say a word to you who are studying for the ministry
and may be married? Just because a man is a minister doesn't inevitably
mean that he will be a husband after God's heart.

I have found that married men at the Seminary are not always thoughtful
of their wives, and that even after they are ordained they may be far from
perfect. A woman married to a prominent minister came to talk to me
because she could hardly carry on without someone's encouragement and
prayers. "He is all sweetness and light outside of the home people think he
is wonderful. But he never speaks a word in kindness to me day after day,
week after week, and on through the year and not a single compliment or
expression of appreciation though I desperately try to please him!" Then
she gave way to tears.

A minister would do well to read again and again Paul's word to Timothy
about the elder's relation to his family and oftener still what he says in
Ephesians and Colossians about husbands and wives and fathers and children.
Spend an hour some day meditating on "husbands love your wives even as
Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for it" until those words
search your heart.

How much tension throughout our social order would be reduced if
those on both sides of the desk could see that people are persons, and
brothers men and women with homes, families, aspirations and fears, joys
and sorrows.

If people are persons, our brothers, haven't we a responsibility that goes
beyond our face-to-face contact with them? Must we not consider our
relation to the social order of which we all are a part, and which affects them
and us so profoundly for good, or ill?

Let us turn again to the story of the Good Samaritan. We are impressed
by his amazing understanding and kindness as he ministers to the robbed
and broken man flung by the side of the road he travelled. He puts us to
shame!

Is there not in this parable a warning to ministers and church officers
that it was the priest and levite, the professional ecclesiastics, who saw the
suffering man but, having no sufficient compassion in their hearts, passed
him by.

Could the priest be likened to the minister who has just left the church
after the dear old ladies who help sustain the pastor's ego had called his
sermon "wonderful", and the levite to the elder who had just served com-
munion and is in a hurry to get home?

It must give us pause that it is the layman whose heart was so moved
that he turned aside to help and served so well the man in desperate need.
The Samaritan was not just content to bind up wounds and to pour in oil
and wine. He took the suffering man to a place where he would have a
chance to rest and recover, and provided not only financially for his care
but probably goodwill as well, for he seems to have been on friendly terms
with the innkeeper.

As we study the parable, we can't help wondering if the Samaritan ever
thought of a wider responsibility than to the man immediately before him.
Unless something was done about the dangerous road that plunged so sharply

36

down from Jerusalem to Jericho, appropriately called "The Way of Blood,"
other travellers, scores of them, would be plundered and murdered. The
situation couldn't be met, by just having the robbers exterminated. They are
persons too. Perhaps if they were all arrested, and kept in prison, other
brigands would be created by the kind of society existing in Judea. The
robbers must become law-abiding and productive members of the country,
and life so changed in it that no other generation of predatory men would
be raised up. I am going beyond Jesus' teaching here, I know; but is it wrong
to follow the line of thought He starts?

Probably the Samaritan had not considered this at all, because the social
sciences were not included in his education. Or if he did see this vaguely,
he might have felt no serious obligation beyond the man lying in the pool
of blood before him, whom he knew he must help, even if the delay meant
a business loss, or death, should the robbers return. How could he have felt
any responsibility for the near-death of this man? Perhaps if he saw the
need, and felt that somebody ought to do something about this desperate
condition which had existed for years, he would be too hopeless to feel any
burden on his shoulders. The whole country was under the dominance of
Rome. Who could change anything in a totalitarian state? Furthermore, and
he must have been keenly aware of this, he was an alien in Judea through
which the road ran. What opportunity would he have to do anything in a
country in which he was not only a stranger, but hated? What influence
could he exert?

Shouldn't our sense of responsibility be stronger than that of the Samari-
tan? Our situation is so different from his. We belong to our community, even
if we moved into it only a year or so ago. Many of us have lived on the
same street for a long time, and are well-known. When we speak people
listen. When we act others follow. This will be all the more true when we
become the minister of a church, especially in a small town, or in the coun-
try.

We are not under the rule of Russia, though Khrushchev would like to
bury us. We live, not in a communist land, where the individual is nothing,
the State everything; but in a democracy, where the authority is in the hands
of the people, if they will exercise their rights; where those who govern are
elected by the people's vote, and where in the long run the conditions under
which men and women live are determined by the people's will.

We understand, as the Samaritan could not possibly have done, that the
individual is a unity; that what affects his body touches his mind and soul,
and that the way he thinks and feels may increase or reduce his physical
well-being. Moreover, we know that the life of the individual is largely in
the hands of the environment in which he is placed. Life now hangs together
so closely the world around, that Dr. Hugh Martin, in his little book on the
Lord's Prayer, is justified in saying, "to pray, 'Give us our daily bread' in-
volves politics, social planning, and international relationships".

Think of a boy in our society. His life is conditioned to a large
extent by his family, his heredity, his early and later years in his home, his
neighborhood gang, his school, the standards set by his community, and the
atmosphere created at that particular time by the world situation. In any
community a great gulf exists between the rich and the poor. There are
those who have winter homes, and summer homes, or, for the latter, substi-

37

tute yachts, or long, expensive vacations, who as they become richer, move
from one section of the city to another more favored, build larger and larger
houses, buy expensive cars, not content with one or two, and multiply their
costly belongings. There are rural slums, and urban slums; as one walks
through any city he finds sections where there is room for the children to
play, and for their parents to have gardens; where there are trees and shrubs,
lovely in the spring, and glorious in the fall, and beautiful flowers which
follow the year around; all of which make living a delight. Not far away
there are areas which stand in gloomy contrast crowded, drab, dirty, dark,
brightened a bit by an occasional red geranium which raises its brave head
above a tin can. Here he finds the children of the poor some of them be-
draggled, playing in the streets, life which is struggle and drudgery, and often
misery.

Normally, fine boys and girls do not come from broken homes, which
are set in the congested areas of big cities; from families which are terribly
impoverished through a depression, or, in days when all goes well with the
country as a whole, whose breadwinners are without jobs, or have to work
long hours for meager wages, unmindful of their own health, and with little
opportunity- to be with their children.

A teacher, trying to get at what was back of the conduct of a boy caught
stealing $25, asked him, "If you had three wishes what would you choose?"
At once came the answer, "If I had three wishes I'd wish my father and
mother got along better with each other; I'd wish somebody back home
would get a job, and I'd wish we could get off relief." Is it strange that the
boy, bitter, insecure, stole? Some boys and girls surmount such difficulties,
and are made strong by their struggle. And some delinquent teenagers come
from homes in which parents are apparently devoted to each other, where
there is wealth and space. But ordinarily that is not the way we find it.
Shouldn't we desire for every child the same advantages our children enjoy,
the chance for life that comes to those raised under the best circumstances?
And haven't we some responsibility for trying to make our wish a reality?

One of our Richmond ministers, pastor of a downtown church, speaking
to the Presbyterian Ministers' Association of his hopes of serving the com-
munity in which his church was located, told of talking to a young woman
just graduating from the William and Man- Extension School, who seemed
to have an amazing knowledge of the people among whom he wished her
to work. When he asked her how she was so well acquainted with their need,
she answered, "I grew up in it. I lived with my mother, or an aunt, both of
whom were domestic servants. I never had three meals a day and was
always hungry." "Did you go to church?" "Even.- Sunday." "EHd it help
you?" "No." "Why?" "Well, how can a child respond to the minister's sermon
on the love and mercy of God, when she is hungry?"

Of course we should try to see that not only one little girl of whom we
have heard, or whom we know, but that all little girls should have bread
enough and to spare, that she and they might find it easier to believe in the
goodness of God, and to love Him. But shouldn't we endeavor to create
conditions which would make it possible for the families of little girls every-
where to have the will and the opportunity to provide them with the necessi-
ties of life, and help them understand that this is their Father's world?

Whether or not the Church in its organized capacity should attempt to
deal directly with the political or economic order, or how far it should go,

38

may be a moot question; let me leave that to your professor of Christian
ethics. But the responsibility of the individual Christian is certainly clear.
Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Labor Govern-
ment, whom Churchill regarded as one of the ablest men in Britain, and
whom Gandhi considered a man of "unparalleled loftiness of intellect",
held, in his little book, Towards a Christian Democracy, that the Church
should not get into politics; but he affirmed even more earnestly that there
should be more Christianity in politicians, and more Christians in politics,
and in the remaking of the economic order, which cannot be separated from
politics. If we love our neighbor, really believe him to be a person like our-
selves, and our brother, then we must be concerned with the neighborhood,
and the larger community in which he lives and works. It isn't enough to
have a sense of responsibility for those who have been robbed and broken
by the social order; we must seek to change the conditions that have ruined
them, that others in the future may have a chance for a rich and full life.

It is hard to know just what is our duty in a specific situation. The Bible
does not go into detail, life is complex and changing, and conditions may be
unlike in different periods and in different communities. We are sure that
the scales of justice should be held evenly, regardless of wealth, position, or
race, that the motto over the portico of the United States Supreme Court
building in Washington, D. C, "Equal Justice Under Law", should be car-
ried out for all men. We know that ghastly poverty in the midst of such
plenty as our nation, by far the richest nation on earth, enjoys, is wrong.
We are sure that people ought to be paid a living wage, but what should be
the wage in our community, or business, we cannot tell. We are convinced
that material goods which can be produced in such abundance in our amaz-
ing, industrialized country should be more equitably distributed; but, when
asked how much each should have, and how this can be brought about, we
are at a loss.

Let me illustrate the difficulty. In a community in which I served I knew
a man of another denomination who gave $50,000 a year for five years to
his church. He was the head of a great department store, and while he was
very successful and rich, he lived simply and walked humbly among his
fellows. To me he was the typical Christian steward.

But to a committee, of which I was a member, there was brought the
problem of several young women who had begun to live promiscuous lives.
When we went into their situation we found that they were all clerks in this
man's store and were being paid a pitifully low wage. They wanted silk
stockings, and lovely blouses, and some pleasure in life; but as they had to
live on a pittance, they couldn't purchase attractive clothes, or pay for the
simplest good times; so they chose the primrose path.

Now what should this man's pastor do? Could he bluntly tell him that
instead of giving $50,000 a year to the church, he should use part or most
of it to increase the wages of his employees, or that he should reduce the
profits of the store and add to the income of those working for him. Should
his minister tell him just what to do, he would probably be resentful. What
right had the minister to dictate to him? Who gave his pastor this authority?
What did the minister know about the problems he would face?

If he increased the income of these needy people, it might throw the
wage scale in the community out of gear; might make it almost impossible
to maintain his relationship, and work, with his fellow business men. Such

39

a step might cause the stockholders to dismiss him, and then how would the
situation be bettered? We can't tell our men, and we can't in a superior
attitude caused perhaps by our ignorance, suggest to them their duty. But
if we can turn their thinking in the right direction by a thoughtful sermon
marked by humility in expression and delivery: or sit with a group of our
ablest men, and women too, and discuss these questions in the same spirit,
they might catch a vision of the changes that might be made to create a more
wholesome community, and gather some of their friends for conference and
discussion, and so little by little conditions might become different and
better.

Sydney Harris, in a recent column, indicates the dilemma of business men
from a little different angle, "I was having lunch yesterday with a book
publisher, who told me that his firm last year made a great deal of money
from a trashy novel that every one in the firm knew was trashy. 'We pub-
lished it, however,' he said, 'and the profits from that one book enabled us
to publish a half-dozen other good books that we knew would not sell. If
we hadn't printed the novel, these other books would never have seen the
light of day.' " Was the firm wrong to publish that book? What if it had
been vulgar, or obscene? How careful we should be in judging others, how
desperately hard it is for our laymen to know what they ought to do, and
for us to know what is our own duty.

Let us consider our obligation as ministers. We must know that what-
ever others have not done in the past, or may not do today, it is our respon-
sibility as ministers, with our laymen to think as honestly, and as objective-
ly as we can, to get at the facts and to look at them in the light of these
great commandments, under the guidance and encouragement of the Holy
Spirit. Cooley reminds us that "the right is the result of the mind's best work
in wrestling with a problem"; we can't escape such a duty; for John Bennett
warns us that "Non-Christian citizens have every right to feel contempt
whenever religion is used by Christians as a substitute for knowledge or
effort".

I can never forget that Charles Kingsley became an authority on sewers.
When asked "Why?" he replied, "Because I believe in the Incarnation." He
saw the obligation a Christian has to change an evil; he felt also an obliga-
tion to know the facts in the realm in which He was acting in Christ's name.

When we thus come together and try to think of what we can do now
in our community, it will mean different things to different people not all
are business men, not all have the same ability or opportunity. It may mean
serving on the school board, or city council, or on a committee that chooses
the candidates for office, or on the League for Planned Parenthood, or the
Council on Human Relations, or writing letters to the newspapers, or to
those in positions of influence, or discussing matters with friends, or starting
forums, or making speeches, or, as in the case of one woman in Virginia,
going from one person to another, meeting with groups, creating public
sentiment until the wrong kina* of paper-back books were eliminated from
the news stands. Certainly it means voting, this is a special challenge to
women as they are in the majority, and ensuring that all are encouraged to
vote, and have the chance. It means that we shall judge every candidate for
office, every law that is proposed, every organization that is projected by
what the man, or law, or organization does to and for people who are
persons, our brothers.

40

Let us return to the first commandment and look at its bearing on what
I have been saying. To change the social order so that it would make life
easier and provide more things for all our neighbors would not certainly
ensure that our neighbors would be satisfied, happy, upright, selfless, living
helpfully with each other.

Social Change of any kind will not be sufficient. Communism certainly is
not the solution. Could a modified socialism in itself solve all of our prob-
lems? I am not saying that such changes may not have some value. But are
they all that we need? One of the best social studies produced in England
in years, The British Worker, quotes with approval a railroad man as saying,
"the funny thing is the more industry becomes socialist, the less social men
become, and the more selfish they behave". When we look at the moral life
of Sweden, which has gone far in this direction, we are not convinced that
this is the way for us.

Increased wealth is not the answer in an already fabulously rich society
in which we have those of the second generation living on relief who are
unwilling to take jobs that are offered. Betrand Russell, that far-seeing
humanist, says quite frankly, "it is not true that the good life will come with
the diminution of poverty". And in America, toward the close of a confer-
ence of social workers, a young woman rose and said, "After we have
secured a minimum wage, and reduced the hours we have to work, there
remain the souls of men."

Going back to England, let me quote Sir Stafford Cripps again, "If men
work for wages they will never be satisfied, with each increase the desire will
only be for a larger increase." The feeling of the rich is the same. A Virginia
capitalist of yesterday when asked, "How much money is enough?" replied,
"Only a little more, Sir." Christ's word stands, "A man's life consisteth not
in the abundance of the things which he possesses." The New English Bible
is even more arresting, "For even when a man has more than enough, his
wealth does not give him life."

Violence will not guarantee our goals. While trying to think through this,
I saw on the night of July 29th the C. B. S. Report on Harlem's 117th
Street, after those fear-filled days of rioting, and was made sick at heart by
the poverty, the boredom, the wretchedness, the hopelessness of the people
their restlessness; the bitterness of most, and the hate of some.

A thoughtful Negro, a professor in a New York university, reflecting on
what had happened, said with conviction, "Violence never cured anything;
we have known it before in this section. Conditions may appear better for
a while; but shortly they slip back to the ways of the past."

Violence magnified into war is not the answer. How hopefully in 1917,
under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, we entered the "war to end all
wars," only to discover in 1939 how terribly deluded we had been. Jesus held
out no hope for violence. "All they that take the sword shall perish with the
sword." A graph in the U. S. News and World Report for August 10th, 1954,
vindicates our Lord's words

"1820 to 1859 92 wars killing. 800,000 people

1860 to 1899106 wars killing 4,600,000 people

1900 to 1949 117 wars killing 42,500,000 people

1950 to 1999 120 wars killing 405,600,000 people

2000 to 2050120 wars killing 4,048,900,000 people

41

If the growing size of wars is projected into the future, a single war in the
first half of the next century might take 3,600,000,000 lives. This war, plus
119 smaller wars projected for the same half century, might bring a death
toll equal to more than 40 per cent of the 10-billion world population esti-
mated for the early part of the next century."

Some turn confidently to education as the New Messiah, though it is
hoary with age, to lead us out of our national and world wilderness. While
working on this, I heard President Johnson say over the radio, "We must
educate our people, our one hope is in education." H. G. Wells, some time
ago, putting his hope also in education, wrote, "Civilization is a race between
education and catastrophe." But education doesn't seem to have the power
to avert catastrophe. The Japanese were the most literate people in the
world, but that did not prevent Pearl Harbor. Our ablest American students
sought out the German universities, because of the superior education they
offered, but their advanced learning didn't immunize the German people
against the virus of Naziism. The horrors of Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen,
Auschwitz, haunt our very souls after nearly two-score years.

Justice Robert Jackson, with the atomic bomb in mind, said, "It is one
of the paradoxes of our time that modern society need fear only the educated
man. The primitive peoples constitute no menace. The most serious crimes
against civilization can be committed only by educated and technical
people."

These are all false Messiahs. No matter how busy, and effective a min-
ister may be in promoting them, in securing new laws, and producing social,
political, or economic changes, he fails unless he exalts Christ, and leads
men to know Him, who alone can change the human heart. But here is our
dilemma. Will those whose hearts have been changed, wisely and earnestly
seek their neighbors' larger good unless they see and feel something of the
social responsibility in which we would involve the Good Samaritan?
Luther, to whom we owe so much, said, "If you regenerate men, society will
be regenerated." But Sydney Cave, principal of New College, London, in
his The Christian Way, does not think that Luther played a very noble part
at the time of the Peasants' Revolt, "when he bade the Princes, 'Stab,
smite and slay,' those who were seeking by force of arms to secure some
measure of social justice."

But Luther's statement holds when we put it negatively. "Society will
not be regenerated unless you regenerate men." We cannot have a new
society with the same old people, selfish, greedy, jealous, hate-filled; no
matter how much they know about social ethics.

Erich Fromm, who has given us The Art of Loving, says, "If there is no
love, nothing is possible", and Frank Laubach, with his broad world-view,
affirms, "We have enough of everything to build a paradise everything
except love." The love for which Dr. Laubach longs, and which the world
so desprately needs, can be born in men only by the presence in then-
hearts of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who so loved the
world that He gave His Son for its redemption; the God Who is love!

The task of the minister is vastly difficult and complex. All of us have
read the story of the woman who was beaten for more than a half-hour,
and then murdered on a city street in Queens, N. Y., while dozens of neigh-
bors saw her terrible danger and suffering, and in a sense passed by on the

42

other side. And there have been accounts of other similar incidents, and
articles inspired by them, one of them entitled "Who Cares?", on the un-
believable indifference, or apathy, of the American people; their self-centered-
ness, their lack of compassion, which left them unwilling at any cost to
themselves to become involved in another's need no matter how evident
or dire.

Some of the members of the congregation the minister serves, growing
up in such a society, may be so lacking in Christian understanding and love
that they, too, will pass by on the other side as they see lying by the very way
they travel, week after week, men and women and little children broken in
heart and life.

In all humility, the minister, dependent on the Lord Jesus Christ, must
prepare for his work by the most unremitting and discriminating study,
and the most disciplined and devoted life. Let us, who are ministers, never
forget, in the midst of all our perplexities, and multiplied duties, that our
essential purpose, the one to which we have been primarily called, and to
which abler men, apart from our Lord, will not give themselves, is to bring
men and women to know God in Christ, so that self may be crucified, and
the love of God shed abroad in their hearts. If we do not do this, and lead
our people to do this, it will not be done.

43

REVIEWS

Jesus of Nazareth
By Joseph Klausner (Beacon Press). 434 pp. $2.75 (paper back).

Beacon Press has just brought out a paper-back edition of a book written
in modern Hebrew in 1922 and translated into English in 1925. Naturally
the book is a reflection of the time of its original writing, but there are values
in it for the present day.

Klausner was a Jew who remained a Jew. He, of course, does not believe
in Jesus as the Messiah or Saviour in any sense. Time and again he quotes
with approval the claim of Wellhausen that Jesus was not a Christian but a
Jew. He was made to be a Christian by his followers. Jesus' thoughts came
mainly from the Judaism of the Pharisees, with some influence from the
Essenes. He was primarily a teacher. He worked miracles, but just the same
kind of miracles performed by many of the Jewish leaders of the time
really nothing supernatural at all. Jesus came to believe that he was the
Messiah and hoped to the very end of his life that he could convince the
Jews. His views of the Kingdom were a mixture of the spiritual and the
nationalistic. While he was in basic agreement with the teachings of the
better Pharisees, he incurred the anger of both Pharisees and Sadducees by
his condemnation of their deficiencies, climaxed by his bold cleansing of the
Temple. The Jewish "trials" were mere preliminary investigations. The
Romans were responsible for the real trial and condemnation. After his death
his body was removed from the new tomb of the rich man, and the finding
of the tomb empty gave rise to visions of the risen Jesus and the beginning
of Christianity as distinct from Judaism.

Klausner's conclusions about Jesus are clearly stated (pp. 41 3f): "He
can be neither God nor the Son of God. . . . Neither can he, to the Jewish
nation, be the Messiah. . . . Neither can they regard him as a Prophet. . . .
Neither can they regard him as a lawgiver or the founder of a new
religion. . . . But Jesus is, for the Jewish nation, a great teacher of morality
and an artist in parable. ... If ever the day should come and this ethical code
be stripped of its wrappings of miracles and mysticism, the Book of the Ethics
of Jesus will be one of the choicest treasures in the literature of Israel for
all time."

The book was written for Jews, not for Christians. The Christian,
though, can learn much about the Jewish background of the times of Jesus
from a real Jewish scholar. Klausner knows the Christian literature of the
liberal and radical scholars of Germany of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Following them, he feels perfectly free to take what he
wants from the Gospels and reject the rest. The Christian reader can get a
good review of that stage of radical criticism.

Klausner maintained an attitude of courtesy and respect toward Christians
throughout his book. Yet he remained a Jew, and he wanted to help other

44

Jews stay Jews too. If we should wish to help Jews become Christians, we
should know Klausner's book and be able to meet its arguments.

Samuel A. Cartledge

Professor of New Testament Language,

Literature, and Exegesis

John Wesley
By V. H. H. Green (Nelson). 168 pp. $5.00.

Lord Atlee, in his history of the British Labour Party, points out that in
England, in contrast to the Continent, the inspiration of the trade union
movement has been Christian rather than Marxist. Sidney Webb, that ardent
admirer of Soviet Marxism, writes: "From the very beginnings of the
Trade Union movement among all sections of the wageearners, of the forma-
tion of Friendly Societies and of later attempts at Adult Education, it is men
who are Methodists . . . whom we find taking the lead and filling the posts
of influence." It was religious radicalism, Dr. V. H. H. Green notes, which
in England was the midwife to political reform.

And yet Wesley himself was an uncompromising conservative. One of
his successors declared that "Methodism was as much opposed to democracy
as it was to sin". Wesley vigorously denounced the American Revolution.
The conduct of George III, he said, was "worthy of an Englishman, worthy
of a Christian, worthy of a King". Wesley was as suspicious of innovation
in religion as he was of innovation in politics: "I still think", he wrote four
years before his death, "that when the Methodists leave the Church, God
will leave them." "We will not, dare not, separate from the Church."

Dr. Green does full justice to the political and social conservatism of
early Methodism. The early Methodists, he says, were pontifical in their
denunciation of radical agitation and civil disobedience. Nevertheless, this
conservatism was wedded to a deep humanitarian concern. Wesley cared
intensely for the poor. By his immense charity he did much to alleviate their
lot by gifts of food, clothes and fuel. He furthered the work of popular
education, not only by creating Sunday Schools, but also by systematically
instructing his lay readers in history and the classics. He inculcated sobriety
and thrift. ("Gain all you can; save all you can; give all you can".) A
contemporary testified that by his labours "the ignorant were instructed and
the wretched relieved and the abandoned reclaimed". "Treat every poor
person", Wesley said, "as you would God Almighty should treat you." It
was Wesley's consuming passion to save men, to promote "real holiness of
heart and life", rather than to change the environment or to reform the
institutions of society. "The rise of Methodism", Dr. Green believes, "was
in some sense a deterent to political and social revolution, averse to revo-
lutionary change and an obstruction to social and political reformation. The
Methodists' energies were to be deployed in works that improved rather
than changed society."

45

How was it that Methodism became identified with radical social reform?
After the death of Wesley, Methodism became a movement of radical
religious dissent. Wesley's successors reacted not only against his authori-
tarian concept of church government but against his paternalistic conception
of charity. They became convinced that social concern must manifest itself
in political agitation and social reform.

It may be too much to claim, as the noted French historian Halevy does,
that Methodism saved England from the horrors of the French Revolution;
nevertheless, it is an indubitable fact that evangelicalism was responsible
for profound and far-reaching social changes.

Dr. V. H. H. Green has written a careful and critical study of John
Wesley, "warts and all". He throws additional light on the unhappy events
associated with the failure of Wesley's marriage. His account of Wesley's
early life is (as we would expect from the author of The Young Mr. Wesley)
unusually informative and full of interest. In this connection, the author
has made extensive use of Wesley's unpublished Oxford diaries. He illum-
inates, in a new way, the ramifications of Wesley's austere, complex, and
paradoxical personality.

This graceful work is a piece of discriminating historical scholarship; it is
not a pious work of simple hagiography. Particularly helpful is the author's
discussion of Wesley's association with the Moravians; less happy is his
gratuitous denigration of Calvinism, which he dubs "a gloomy and mechan-
ical creed."

The measure of Wesley's achievement may be judged from the fact that,
during his long life of incessant labour, he travelled 250,000 miles (mainly
on horseback), preached 40,000 sermons, and established over 800 meeting
houses. When he believed himself to be dying, in 1753, he wrote a simple
epitaph for his tombstone, "A brand plucked from the burning". He believed
that he was providentially called of God and in this persuasion he lived and
died. To quote the words of an obituary notice, "instead of being an
ornament to literature he was a blessing to his fellows: instead of the genius
of his age, he was the servant of God".

Stuart B. Babbage

Guest Professor of Practical Apologetics

and Church History

The Holy Spirit in Christian Education

By Rachel Henderlite (The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1964). 127
pp. $1.95.

"The change in the heart of man, which is the goal of Christian educa-
tion, is the work of the Spirit of God. This drives ... the educator to the
real question: What, then, can I do?" (p. 10). Dr. Henderlite explores this
question.

The book contains four sections. In the first part the author states her
point of view with regard to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the nature

46

of man. She is concerned with the failure of Christian educators to take into
account adequately either the Spirit of God or the spirit in man. The second
chapter deals with the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing men to God. The
author seeks to deduce from her theological work certain implications for
the theory of learning. The third section presents a study of the Spirit's
work in and through the Scriptures together with implications for the content
or subject matter of Christian education. The final portion explores the
relationship of the Spirit to the Church. Insights drawn from this study are
brought to bear on the questions of the context and means of Christian
education.

The book is a continuation of the Christian education theory adumbrated
by the author in her earlier volume, Forgiveness and Hope (1961). She
relates theology to education by deducing implications for the educational
ministry from theology. This is one way to relate the two fields, but not the
only way. This approach is commendable in that the resulting education is
likely to be faithful to the determinative discipline theology. The weak-
ness of the approach lies in the tendency merely to see implications for the
Christian education program now in existence. Is it not possible that the
reality and presence of the Spirit could so shatter our present program that
the old questions of goals, subject matter and methods might become ir-
relevant?

For example, Dr. Henderlite states that the coming of the Spirit enables
one to cease being preoccupied with self and given to mission (p. 41).
What does this mean in terms of our educational program? Does it suggest
that we equip students by means of proper subject matter and attitude for
witnessing in the world? Or does it bring judgment upon our present
program which in fact is preoccupied with ourselves? Do we not spend
most of our time organizing for ourselves, getting materials for ourselves
and planning for ourselves? How much of our Christian education ministry
can be characterized as serving others? Do our organizational structures
enable us to get out of the Church for mission or do they hold us within the
Church for self-edification?

Perhaps the Spirit would not only have us bring our present practices
into line with His work but also encourage us to break out of our current
patterns of fulfilling the teaching function of the Church.

Neely McCarter

Associate Professor of Christian

Education

The Man For Others

By Erik Routley (Oxford University Press, New York, 1964). 107 pp.
$1.50.

The publisher advertises this volume as "an important contribution to the
discussion inspired by the book Honest to God". Mr. Routley confesses that
Bishop Robinson's work has stimulated him to attempt a new statement of
Christology which will be both understandable to men today and agreeable
with the New Testament witness.

47

The author proceeds to discuss Jesus as the Redeemer, the Messiah, the
Son, the Divine human being as well as the consequences of Christ's life
and work for us. These presentations contain many fresh and invigorating
ideas. For example, in commenting on Hebrews 1:3 he says: "The 'stamp'
image is more exact, in that is suggests that God's very being is stamped out
in a human matrix humanity being the substance in which the stamp's
impression is made" (p. 59). Or again, "What has happened in the Incarna-
tion is, among so much else, the lifting of the curse which said that man
could not see God and live" (p. 62).

Mr. Routley, like Bishop Robinson, knows that the Aristotelian world-
view has collapsed. He is attempting to restate Christology without depend-
ing on this particular frame of reference. Yet he himself does not seem to
have found a more viable alternative. He says that Paul demythologizes
the three-decker universe and translates the old thought forms of "under
the earth" and "above the earth" into spiritual verities which apply throughout
human life (p. 33). In another place he suggests that the three-level-universe
really means three moral stages (p. 75). He affirms that God and the world
are metaphysically different things, but that they are morally one (p. 88).
These statements are confusing to this reviewer. The consistent historical
approach of Gogarten's Christological restatement (The Reality of Faith,
chapter 2) or the Christology of "Call" and "Response" developed by Paul
Van Buren (The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, pp. 47ff) seem to be more
palatable.

Nevertheless Mr. Routley is engaged in a necessary exercise. Let us hope
that the Christological work of our time can avoid the acerbity which seems
to be an endemic trait of theological debate.

Neely McCarter
Associate Professor of
Christian Education

Atheism, Humanism and Christianity
By Hanns Lilje (Augsburg Publishing House, 1964). 77 pp. $1.75.

The author of this book was arrested by Hitler's Gestapo and confined
to a prison camp. Condemned to death, he was transferred to Nuremberg
to await execution. The timely arrival of American troops saved his life.

Hans Lilje has been Bishop of the Lutheran Church in Hanover since
1947. He was President of the Lutheran World Federation from 1952 to
1957 and he is a former Vice President of the World's Student Christian
Federation.

This book is the product of profound reflection on the problems of
atheism and humanism as they confront the Church today.

There are, he points out, three current forms of atheism. There is
militant atheism the atheism we associate with Marxism. "Modern

48

Marxism", he says, "contains more hard and unalterable dogmas than any
comparable movement in church history. This form of spiritual simplicity
is, for the follower of totalitarian thought, a guarantee of assurance." But,
he notes, "one of the greatest difficulties of this type of thought exists in the
fact that it will always be incapable of comprehending the tragic." And the
world is, unhappily, full of tragedies. Marxism has no word of healing for
man in the personal crises of life.

There is, secondly, philosophical atheism, which we associate with exist-
entialism. For the existentialist the conviction that "God is dead" is a fact
of tragic significance. Speaking of Camus (who was, however, not formally
an existentialist) Bishop Lilje says: "His thirst for something divine is so
great that he reproaches God, as it were, for not existing." "In his presenta-
tion every line regularly and painstakingly cries out in search of a saviour."
Camus expresses the anguish of modern man who believes that he is aband-
oned and alone in the universe.

Thirdly, there is what Lilje describes as practical atheism. Bengel coined
this phrase in 1742. Commenting on the parable of the Rich Man and
Lazarus, Bengel makes the concise remark that the rich man was not con-
demned to hell because of any particular heresy, but only because of the
fact that he lived in a certain "practical atheism" which ignored God and
eternity. In the secularised world of the west what we have is "not open
revolt but a silent paganism."

What is the Church to do? Intellectual argumentation will not suffice.
"No apologetic debate will be capable of convincing the skeptic that the
church is still vital." The revival of the Church, he insists, is dependent
upon repentance, upon renewed faith, and upon new obedience.

This needs to be said. Our apologetic is often altogether too slick and too
glib. It is too self assured. But it will not do. We, too, are under judgment.
We, too, need to repent and reform.

These published addresses enable us to understand something of the
intellectual ferment of our post-Christian world. But they do more: they
point us to the way of repentance and renewal.

Stuart B. Babbage

Guest Professor of Practical Apologetics

and Church History

But For the Grace of God

By Phillip E. Hughes (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1964). 94 pp. 5s.

Dr. Hughes begins this book with a definition of grace as "undeserved
blessing freely bestowed on man by God". It may be asked if the familiar
definition of grace as "undeserved divine favour" would not have been a more
accurate and safe formula, for we are constantly tempted to fall into the
error of Roman Catholic theology by speaking of grace as a depersonalized
substance, and too many of us attach grace to the Holy Spirit rather than
to Christ.

49

But Dr. Hughes, throughout the book, carefully preserves the personal
character and setting of grace. The grace of God is discussed in relation to
faith, works, the law, the covenant, and election all in chapters which
give careful summaries of the teaching of the New Testament.

Three chapters, "Grace and the Sacraments", "Grace and Bishops",
"Grace and Mary", form the core of the book. Here Dr. Hughes enters
vigorously and incisively into the current ecumenical discussion. With the
help of Angustine, the Angelican Reformers, and the 39 Articles, he cogently
states the "evangelical" view over against modern developments in High
Anglican and Roman theology. Yet at no point does he forget that he is
writing to teach the ordinary lay reader a positive scriptural doctrine.

This book is one of a series written by Anglican evangelical scholars,
the aim of the project being: "The recovery of the dynamic witness, fellow-
ship in worship, and victorious living of the New Testament Church." If all
the titles achieve the standard set here, it will be a notable series indeed.

Ronald S. Wallace
Professor of Biblical Theology

Studies in Genesis One

By Edward J. Young (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Phila-
delphia, 1964). 105 pp.

The initial chapters of the Bible continue to have a very special fascina-
tion for Old Testament scholars. Their importance as regards form and
content, text and context, historical and theological implication is attested by
a number of stimulating commentaries and studies.

Dr. Young is presenting us in his recent Studies in Genesis One with an
interpretation of that chapter based on the belief "that the facts of the
created universe, when rightly interpreted, will prove to be in harmony with
the revelation which God has given us in the first chapter of Genesis."

The studies focus on three areas: (1) The Relation of Genesis I: 1 to
verses 2 and 3; (2) The Interpretation of Genesis 1:2; and (3) The Days of
Genesis, the discussion of which occupies more than half of the book.

Dr. Young's ability to state the problems in question and to present the
various viewpoints of scholars in the given areas is most commendable. It is
cogently argued that Genesis 1:1 should be read as a sentence by itself and
not as a dependent clause as is done by some translators and interpreters.
Dr. Young believes that the first sentence in the Bible is a declaration of
"absolute creation." Therefore, Genesis 1:2-31 form a unit by themselves.
However, verse 2 does posit a special problem. Is it closely related to verse
1 (restitution hypothesis), is it a parenthetical phrase (thus putting in ques-
tion the creatio ex nihilo), or does it employ mythological language (sug-
gesting "nothingness" or "God-hostile forces")? After discussing the views of
Barth, Rabast and v. Rad among others, Young concludes that v. 2 simply
tells us of the first stage of the earth when it was in no condition to be

50

inhabited by man. To stress the point that v. 2 is simply the world that Goo
created, absolutely under his control, he writes: "There is no reason, so far
as one can tell from reading the first chapter of Genesis, why God might
not have pronounced the judgment 'very good', over the condition described
in the second verse."

The excursus dealing with the translation of ruah elohim as "Spirit of
God" or "mighty storm" is especially worthwhile reading and Dr. Young's
defense of the traditional translation "Spirit of God" is convincingly pre-
sented.

One could have wished that Dr. Young might have discussed a little
more fully the function of the verb hayetah in verse 2. He simply states:
"Verse one is a narrative complete in itself. Verses 2-31 likewise constitute
a narrative complete in itself. In this narrative the first verb is wayyomer.
No previous verb in the perfect appears." One wonders if that is not too
categorical a statement.

In the final section Dr. Young presents a strictly historical, chronological
understanding of the six days in Genesis as over against the current "frame-
work" interpretation. He suspects that those scholars who see in Genesis I a
theological perspective of creation "are moved by a desire to escape the
difficulties which exist between Genesis and the so-called 'findings' of science.
That such difficulties do exist cannot be denied, and their presence is a
concern to every devout and thoughtful student of the Bible. It is for this
reason that one must do full justice both to Scripture and to science."

As one reads on, however, one wonders if science actually poses any
problems since "in the nature of the case, general revelation is to be in-
terpreted by special revelation, nature by Scripture, 'science' by the Bible".
If there appears to be a conflict this is only due to the fact that we do not
deal properly with science; or to use Dr. Young's own words: "much that
is presented as scientific fact is written from a standpoint that is hostile to
supernatural Christianity." Hence there is very little of a problem left, when
it comes to establishing a strictly historical, chronological sense for the six
days of Genesis I. However, while Dr. Young dismisses the possibility of
having two accounts of creation in Genesis I and II, arguing for the fact that
they complement each other, he does raise interesting problems in the dis-
cussion. While Genesis I is to be taken as strictly chronological he states
about Genesis II: "It is obvious that a chronological order is not intended
here." But is that so obvious from a reading of the chapter?

An interesting statement is the following in connection with the interpre-
tation of "day" as a strictly 24 hour period or otherwise: "If the word 'day'
is employed figuratively, i.e., to denote a period of time longer than twenty-
four hours, so also may the terms 'evening' and 'morning', inasmuch as they
are component elements of the day, be employed figuratively. It goes without
saying that an historical narrative may contain figurative elements. Their
presence, however, can only be determined by means of exegesis."

Could we not say on the basis on this argument that a more theologically
oriented interpretation of Genesis I need not deny the actuality of a Sovereign
Creator and absolute creation, even if it regards the framework of a week
figuratively? Dr. Young seems to argue that it would have to do so.

It is a valuable exercise for spirit and mind to read Dr. Young's Studies
in conjunction with v. Rad's exposition of Genesis I, both of which show

51

the riches to be mined from the creation account in the Bible without which
we would indeed be poor since neither science nor myth can give us the
revelation which we need for a proper understanding of our Creator and
His creation.

Ludwig R. Dewitz

Professor of Old Testament, Language,

Literature, and Exegesis

Last Things First
By Gordon Rupp (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1964). 83 pp. $2.00.

The Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Manchester
(England) always writes with grace and verve. This book the substance of
four addresses on the final section of the Creed) is no exception. Gordon
Rupp has a sure instinct for the arresting phrase and the apposite quotation.
Take this quotation, with its appended comment: "Somebody says in one of
Dostoevski's novels, 'We have five senses for life on this earth. Who knows
whether we haven't another ninety and five which we are to develop in
eternity?' Well, we have one such other sense, which is faith, which we have
to use and exercise, so that when we come to God's City we shall say with
Richard Baxter 'I have been this way before. I know my way about these
streets. I recognize them.' " Or take this comment: "Leonardo's great 'Last
Supper' is fading away. He used the wrong kind of oils and though they
put all kinds of lights round it nowadays, it will one day disappear. Not so
with the real original communion of the Last Supper. That is renewed
through the centuries as the friends of Jesus gather round him and he breaks
the bread." Or again: "One of the reasons for the greatness of Leonardo da
Vinci's 'Last Supper' is that he chose the moment when Jesus has announced
to his disciples that one of them will betray him, and so each is pointing to
himself and asking 'Is it I? Is it I?' Woe betide the Church militant here on
earth, if for one moment it remits its penitential self-examination in the
presence of God."

Rupp has a flair for pungent and powerful expression. The temptation
to multiply illustrations is hard to resist: "Original sin means we are all in it
together, from Stone Age Man to Space Age Man, and original sin, says
Herbert Butterfield, is the one dogma which the historian must confirm.
Whether we turn up the ruins of some rose red city half as old as time, or
whether we go home to the news and our evening papers, the kaleidoscopic
pattern of evil and misery may change, but the primary elements are con-
stant." Or, as a final example: "As you look along the sky-line of the city
of London you see two buildings one the Old Bailey, on its roof the
statue of Justice blindfolded and impartial, holding the balances even.
And then St. Paul's and on its dome the Cross. Here are two kinds of
righteousness, the Law and the Gospel. It is not by ignoring sin that God
forgives us in a kind of heavenly 'That's all right, Jack'. When in the twelfth
century one asked St. Anselm why it was God couldn't forgive men their
sins just by saying that he had done so, the answer was given, 'Thou hast

52

not considered the gravity of sin'. But in the Cross of Christ we do so
consider. We face the truth about ourselves in the only place where we dare
face it, in the presence of God's forgiving mercy. Law and Gospel come
together belong to mercy's whole design. If we will not come to God
in the light, he will wait in the darkness, until our own sheer necessity drives
us home where we belong. Law and Gospel as the Reformers said, God's
left hand and God's right hand as we see them in Rembrandt's wonderful
picture of the Prodigal Son, the Father's hands clasped together, trembling
with happiness and joy behind his son's back 'This my son was dead and
is alive again, he was lost and is found'."

These addresses represent superb preaching of a high order in which the
polished perfection of the phrase is uniformly matched by the profundity of
the thought.

Stuart B. Babbage

Guest Professor of Practical Apologetics

and Church History

Protestant Churches and Reform Today
Edited by William J. Wolf (The Seabury Press). 156 pp. $3.95.

How revolutionary is our age? Most of the contributors to the volume
of essays edited by William J. Wolf agree that the situation which confronts
the churches in the latter half of the twentieth century calls for radical de-
velopments in Christian strategy, organization and even in theology.

Addressing themselves in part to social and political developments and
in part to the developing "reformation" of the Roman Catholic church, the
Anglican, Baptist, United Church, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian con-
tributors candidly re-examine the weaknesses and strengths of their own
traditions and attempt to look forward in a constructive way at the possibili-
ties for continuing reform within the Protestant churches. As a Roman
Catholic contributor sadly concludes, in a final essay, the Protestants have
given more weight to questions arising from the ecumenical movement and
from secular challenges to the churches than to questions arising from
Protestant-Catholic dialogue.

The writers, have, however, raised some thought-provoking questions
which should be carefully considered by concerned churchmen. Has the
Church, for example, continued to understand itself in a fundamentally
medieval way, even while encouraging the secular world to social and political
revolution, as Lewis Mudge asserts (p. 131-2)? Are we, as Daisuke Kitagawa
says (p. 15), "entering a stage of human civilization in which work as a
creative process is at last possible"? And, again with Kitagawa (p. 17), how
can the Church best participate in the building of the city and thus "be the
Church today in urban culture?" Are Baptists capable of sharing their
peculiar insights and commitments in serious ecumenical conversation? Can
any church specifically the Lutheran avoid betraying its Lord either
by denying or overstressing its special accent in the proclamation of the

53

gospel? Are the churches ready or willing to be turned "inside out" in the
service of Christ?

These are questions which no reviewer can answer for the Church. But
it is good to look through the windows opened in such a book as this, to
glimpse something of the forward-looking design displayed in these sketches
of what is and what may be. Revolutionary or not, the latter part of the
twentieth century is an exciting time to be a part of the church, and while
one is glad to have his own room, it is interesting to see how others are
thinking of remodeling their parts of the total structure.

James H. Gailey. Jr.

Professor of Old Testament Language,

Literature, and Exegesis

Drinking: A Christian Position

By Arnold B. Come (Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1964). 84 pp.
$1.25.

As one of a series dealing with "Christian perspectives on social prob-
lems", this little book is intended to provide something that will "meet a
challenge from an exceedingly robust minority of laymen for brief, readable
analyses of cultural problems from a theological perspective". Starting with
"The Alcohol Problem" it moves on to present the necessity of finding
"a Christian Position." This line of argument is developed in a third chapter
on "Why Do Men Drink?" The book concludes with a chapter on "Christian
Resources" to enable a man to drink without injurious effects.

This book concerns a controversial subject. It does a fair job presenting
the enormity of the problem and is often helpful in the analysis of it. In
this and in its setting forth of the unpredictable and uncontrollable factors
that ever constitute a threat to any drinker the author has all but given away
his case for a Christian approach involving even moderation. It is regrett-
able, therefore, that throughout the book from Foreword to concluding
chapter those who think differently are referred to as "intoxicated with pious
self-righteousness", "moralistic abstainers", "hopelessly irrelevant", etc. This
attitude is not conducive to the cause of truth and cooperation in the discov-
ery of an answer.

Why does this book dismiss in two or three lines in its chapter on "The
Alcohol Problem" and have no reference in the chapter on "Why Do Men
Drink?" to the part played by the liquor and other interests in propagating
attitudes, social patterns and all the rest in order to enlarge the liquor traffic?

Its handling of Scripture reminds one of the procedures used by those
who a century ago justified slavery and of some of those who today would
justify segregation.

In our modern context, there might be at least these two tests of a book
on this subject: How will the liquor industry regard it? What will the Devil

54

(and the reader can define this to suit himself) think of it? Each may lose
some sleep over this volume but not much. It will certainly challenge its
readers to think and the Devil does not like that.

Dean G. McKee

Professor of Biblical Exposition

A Theological Interpretation of American History

By C. Gregg Singer (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company).
305 pp. $4.95.

The Scriptures, as interpreted by the pre- 1700 American Puritans, supply
the frame of reference for Dr. Singer's discussion of American political
thought. Seeking the inner meaning of intellectual changes through an
analysis of concurrent theological and metaphysical issues, he traces liberal-
ism's victory over orthodoxy as the Puritan concept of a constitutional
republic gave way before swelling demands for a popular democracy. (By
"orthodoxy" he means the interpretation of Scripture held by the Puritans.)

When a writer attempts to interpret history, he invites his reader to assay
his interpretative process. Though Singer adopts Puritan thought as his norm
he spends insufficient time upon the exposition of the norm. Anyone who
is familiar with authoritative studies of New England thought studies such
as those of Perry Miller will find significant gaps in Singer's summary
account. Moreover, the book contains no bibliography to guide the student
to a more adequate understanding of the norm. The novice is thus apt to
overlook the fact that the early divines of Puritanism brooked no challenge
to their interpretation of the Scriptures: only fools, they implied, would deny
their convincing conclusions. But study of Scripture in the past two hundred
and fifty years has not always confirmed the validity of their conclusions.
Scripture is the Word of the Sovereign God, not the word of our Founding
Fathers, and study of that Word needs to be undertaken under the guidance
of the Holy Spirit. It is one thing to expound Puritan political theory within
the context of seventeenth century thought; it is another thing to demand that
we accept these views as the norm of orthodoxy in the twentieth century
without further proof. It is one thing to trace departure from early Puritan
political concepts; it is another to place value judgments, especially judg-
ments labeled Scriptural judgments, upon all such departures and all sub-
sequent innovations in political thought.

The task before the reader of this book is therefore great. The author's
factual knowledge of American history is enlightening and entertaining for
it is presented in a clear and readable style. His survey of the struggle be-
tween the forces of the right and those of the left in relation to the American
political pilgrimage is sufficiently simplified to exhibit tendencies and direc-
tions. But his evaluation of concepts and forces, his charge that America
has moved steadily away from Scriptural government and thus from God's
will, calls for more convincing analysis and support than he offers here.

55

Uncritical adoption of Singer's interpretation is likely to provide proga-
ganda for the extreme right. Singer, like the advocates of the right, distrusts
democracy. A critical study of material here presented and Singer's interpre-
tation of it may challenge the reader to seek a more adequate understanding
of the vital relationship between Christian thought and political theory.

Hubert V. Taylor

Professor of Public Speech and Music

We The People
By Kathleen Bliss (Fortress Press). 139 pp., $1.75.

This is really a book about "the people of God" as its analysis of defini-
tions of "laity" tends to show. It seeks to reduce the "over-againstness" of
common thinking about clergy and laity, a quite important correction since
the laity constitute 99.5% of all Christians.

Dr. Bliss writes with enthusiasm about the part of the people in the
Church. With genuine appreciation for its institutional aspects, she goes
about her major task of trying to give meaning, theological meaning, to the
nature and work of the Church as it relates to the great mass of those who
comprise its membership. Aware of the attacks on the Church, the low ebb
of interest in many places, the failure so often to relate to contemporary
life, the divisions, the inertia and other problems, the author has written a
thoughtful account of the encouraging and hopeful other side of the story.
The chapters on the renewed concern for the Church among laity and the
increasing part taken in the life of the Church by them should contribute to
that renewal and increase.

Many may be familiar with the great missionary and other conferences
from Edinburgh 1910 to Amsterdam 1948 but few will have been aware of
the leading part played by laymen in Twentieth Century developments. Just
as others have shown how a major impulse for Christian unity has come
from the mission field, so Dr. Bliss clarifies the significant part of lay people
in both the missionary and especially the ecumenical movement.

One cannot but note that the author is a woman and though she does
not make a special point of the contribution of women in the life of the
Church, she might have done so. In many of our churches the women are
not only more numerous and active, but they are better informed, more
sensitive to where the balance of Christian truth lies with respect to the
pressing issues of the Kingdom, and they often have more vision and dedi-
cation for the task. Dr. Bliss is one of two women on the Executive Com-
mittee of the World Council of Churches and is at present chairman of its
Division on Ecumenical Action.

This book reflects a balanced and illuminating perspective on the com-
mon people who make up the Church. It ought to be read by many of our
thoughtful lay men and women as well as by theological students and min-
isters.

Dean G. McKee

Professor of Biblical Exposition

56

Theologians of Our Time

Edited by Leonhard Reinisch (The University of Notre Dame Press,
Notre Dame, Indiana, 1964). 235 pp. $2.25.

This new paperback from the University of Notre Dame Press is intended
primarily for a Roman Catholic audience. Its purpose is to give a reasonably
popular but accurate summary of some great contemporary theologians,
both Protestant and Romanist, in order that priests and intelligent laymen
may know the powerful currents flowing through the Christian world in the
life of both the Roman and Protestant churches today.

This book can be for us Protestants also a door to a world we too must
enter if we are to think and act responsibly within our own church tradition.
We know instinctively that we are somehow deeply involved in what is going
on in Rome and throughout the Christian world. For some this is elating;
for others it is discomforting. Undoubtedly we all feel both threat and hope
at one and the same time; we are all ambivalent in that we wish both to
know and to ignore the more progressive Romanist theology and policy.

The first six chapters present six Protestant theologians (one chapter
for each) : Barth, Bultmann, Brunner, Althaus, Tillich and Reinhold
Niebuhr. These chapters are remarkably clear, fair, objective and representa-
tive of each man considered. These are no caricatures! As Protestants we
may learn from these Roman presentations of our own men; even those
among us who know these Protestant theologians well will gain fresh insights
and find new dimensions here.

The last six chapters consider six contemporary Romanist thinkers. Many
of us will not even recognize their names (to say nothing of their thought) ;
they are Karl Adam, Romano Guardini, Heinrich Schlier, Hans Urs von
Balthasar, Yves Congar and Karl Rahner. Though they may be strangers
to us yet these men and their thought are mdst certainly in the background
of the titanic ecclesiastical struggle shaking the Roman Church today. The
thought of these men would revolutionize and re-form Christendom. We
should know about them.

The writers of all chapters (each of about twelve to twenty pages) have
adopted a similar scheme. Much of each chapter is made up of quoted
selections from the theologians considered. The major disappointment (even
frustration) caused by this book is that it does not give the sources of the
quotations. This would have been so helpful. We cannot speak for the selec-
tions from the Romanist theologians but the Protestant quotations, at least,
are generally so well chosen that it is a pity not to be able to find sources
immediately. At the end of the book there is a most helpful bibliography for
each man. The present reviewer means to dip deeper into the works of some
of these Romanists.

In important areas of thought these Romans sometimes sound so
Protestant, but it is not fair to say only that! At times they show a loftier
Protestantism than we generally know and practice. Of course they are not
Protestant; they are loyal Romanist scholars, Biblical and systematic theolo-
gians, struggling (as is Protestantism) with such great doctrines as salvation
(the rescue of man by God from all that would destroy him) and the

57

Church (the realm within which this salvation is experienced and known).
The tensions between our two traditions are evident.

This book does not carry the Roman Imprimatur, and thus it does not
guarantee freedom from error in Romanist dogma and morality. It is
obviously meant to be a serious contribution to Protestant-Roman Catholic
dialogue, and adventure that takes both sides beyond "safe" boundaries and
demands that we all investigate again and again what it means to be
Christian, to preach Christ, and to belong to His Body.

All of this leaves this reader uncomfortable; perhaps God is delighted
that this is so!

Olof Halvard Lyon
Dean of Students

The Case For Calvinism
By Cornelius Van Til (The Craig Press, 1964). pp. S3.75.

As definitely as Kant's critique, this is a study in methodology, but it
presents a methodology that is diametrically opposite to that of Kant. Kant
starts with autonomous man who in his fancied self-sufficiency legislates for
all reality, who internalizes in himself sin and the fall and thus denies the
historicity of man's fall into sin, who likewise internalizes in himself re-
demption so as to deny the story of the transition from wrath to grace
wrought by the merciful God through the redemption which is in Christ
Jesus. "All men do their thinking on the basis of a position accepted by
faith". To make room for his own faith, Kant's self-authenticating man must
remove the Christian faith, for every logical activity and all research into
the realm of fact is in the interest of one's totality-vision. Conversely, the
Christian unashamedly builds his own view of man on the Christian story
believing that God has already pre-interpreted reality and that the self-
authenticating Christ speaks authoritatively in His Word. "It is the would-be
self-sufficient, this would-be autonomous man that sets himself up as judge
above the claims of the self-authenticating Christ ... In his eyes he is the
judge of the supreme court . . . The self-authenticating man virtually takes
the place that Christ has in the Christian religion."

Now Van Til ascribes this Kantian methodology not only to Hordern
(speaking for the New Reformation Theology) and to DeWolf (representing
the Liberal) but to Carnell (who professes to state the case for Orthodox
Theology). He particularly laments that his former student uses a method
which is not true to Carnell's own deepest Christian convictions. In starting
with the man of Boston Personalism Carnell denies to God the initiative and
introduces into Protestantism a natural theology more destructive than that
of Thomism, and a soteriology more semi-Pelagian than that of Trent.
"Carnell's method sets up man as sovereign over God." He places his
"rational man" as judge over Christ rather than Christ as judge over his
"rational man".

While there are here and there phrasings of the matter that the reviewer
would express differently and there are places in which one's best judgment

58

does not concur with the author's the main thrust of the work is true. It
demands the fullest consideration that we may be biblical realists and not
Kantian idealists that we may not be wise in our own conceits but may
humbly think God's thoughts after Him. The wisdom of man must give way
to the believing endeavor to bring every thought into captivity to Christ.

William C. Robinson

Professor of Ecclesiastical History,

Church Polity, and Apologetics

Guilt and Grace

By Paul Tournier (Harper & Row). 213 pp. $3.75.

In this book, Dr. Tournier, a Swiss Psychiatrist, sets forth, in a clear
way, the problem of guilt in our society, and how this guilt can be alleviated.
He begins by showing how everything we do in life is tainted with guilt.
We feel guilty because we do not live up to the expectations of others,
because we waste our time, because we lack money or because we have
money, because we have done evil and because we have not done good.
Throughout this first section on the extent of guilt, he hints that there is a
"true guilt" and a "false guilt". Then, in the second section, he differentiates
between these two kinds of guilt. False guilt is that which comes as a result
of the judgments and suggestions of men. True guilt is that which results
from divine judgment; it has to do with our separation and alienation from
God.

In the latter half of the book, the author shows how God's grace liberates
us from our guilt. This takes place in the recognition and confession of true
guilt, and the subsequent acceptance of God's unconditioned love revealed
in Christ. He emphasizes that false guilt keeps us from seeing true guilt, and
that only as we let go of false guilt and recognize true guilt can God's grace
become effective. Of course, the recognition of true guilt is, in itself, the
work of God's grace; it can take place only in an atmosphere of acceptance.

What is good in this book is that throughout Dr. Tournier seeks to relate
his experiences and what he knows about Psychiatry to the Biblical message.
He does this interestingly and with some clarity. A little more clarity, how-
ever, would have been helpful, especially in his explanation of just what true
guilt is. He does not adequately show how this true guilt is a state or condi-
tion of man.

On the whole, though, the book should be read by ministers and lay
people alike. Its main point that superficial judgments and recriminations
of people, which the Church so often is guilty of, serve to hinder rather
than help the gospel needs to be pondered by all Church people.

Calvin Kropp
Graduate Student

59

The Christian Fright Peddlers

By Brooks R. Walker (Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York,
1964). pp. $4.95

Does the end justify the means? All Christians must answer this question
in the negative, and most Americans will answer the same way. A growing
minority, however, answer in the affirmative. To tell the story of that part of
this minority on the far right is the purpose of this book.

The author himself has encountered the extremism of the far right. In
addition to a first-hand acquaintance with the literature in this field, he has
attended meetings of various rightist groups and has had personal conferences
with many of their leaders. On two occasions his home in California has been
bombed.

In an informative and interesting way he surveys the background and
approach of those groups led by Robert DePugh (Minutemen), Myers Low-
man (Circuit Riders), Billy James Hargis (Christian Crusade), Fred Schwarz
(Christian Anti-Communist Crusade), Carl Mclntire (Twentieth-Century
Reformation Hour and Christian Beacon), and Robert Welch (John Birch
Society). While careful not to lump all together as demonstrating the same
degree of extremism, the author tries 'to discover the basis for their wide
appeal in America today. Why have they met with such a response in stirring
up suspicion against church leaders and church organizations? How can both
Schwarz and Hargis collect annually over one million dollars each for then-
operations? How can Mclntire support a daily radio program on almost 600
stations in North America? How can certain groups convince many people
that fluoridation of water and a community's mental health program are
part of the Communist conspiracy? There is no single answer, but the author
points to their appeal to fear which may be understood in the light of our
personal and national insecurity.

One source of the "pseudo-patriotism" of these fright peddlers is then-
lack of historical perspective. This weakness is evaluated in the light of a
survey of freedom of religion in America from the struggles of Deist Thomas
Jefferson and Baptist Roger Williams down to reactions to Supreme Court
decisions on prayer in public schools.

The minister will find especially helpful a description of the theological
basis of several of these groups. For example, according to the author,
Welch's theology, as found in the BLUE BOOK of the John Birch Society,
was strongly influenced by nineteenth century liberalism with its inadequate
doctrine of evil. Man is pictured as riding on an escalator, ever moving up-
ward and onward. With no adequate doctrine of man Welch is unable to
deal constructively with evil. When a person clearly indicates that he is not
rising but instead demonstrates evil as a fallen being, then for Welch he is
less than a man. When the evil is extreme, this person is thought to be de-
monic, deserving to be treated as devil and not as man. Such a "romantic"
view of man becomes the basis on which opposition is to be dealt with,
whether it arises in Moscow or in Washington.

For the person concerned with dealing constructively with the ideas and
methods of the radical right this volume has an important message. The
author is Unitarian and thus limited by his theology, but one could wish that

60

more Christian ministers took their theology as seriously in seeking to
understand the methods and motivations of extremists in our society. The
appeal of this book is for action on the personal level which respects the
dignity of every individual, but with this appeal is issued a warning which
keeps ringing in this reviewer's ears: "The greatest threat from right-wing
extremism makes itself known on a personal, rather than on a public level.
It is simply that we who oppose extremism may become like it. Not in terms
of ideas . . . but in terms of our attitudes and modes of dealing with persons.
It was Adolph Hitler . . . who remarked that the great strength of the totali-
tarian state is that it forces all those who fear it to become like it . . . The
great danger from authoritarianism is that those who oppose it will take the
authoritarian stance. In attempting to counter the arbitrary and the coercive,
we ourselves may easily become arbitrary and coercive."

Wade P. Huie, Jr.

Peter Marshal Professor of Homiletics

SHORTER NOTICES

Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind

By P. T. Forsyth (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids,
Mich., 1964). 258 pp. $195.

It was John McConnachie who, in a memorable phrase, described P. T.
Forsyth as a "Barthian before Barth". Karl Barth's son, Markus Barth, has
called Forsyth "the theologian for the practical man". It is a remarkable
fact that, after half a century of studied neglect, Forsyth is steadily coming
into his own. Today, an increasing number of his books are being rescued
from undeserved oblivion and reprinted.

For those who are prepared to master Forsyth's idiosyncratic style there
is deep profit in this classic work on preaching. J. S. Whale justly comments:
"This prince of the Church did grapple with those final facts of human nature
against which sentimental optimism is always powerless. He knew that
undogmatic Christianity is a contradiction in terms. Just because he was an
able defender of evangelical truths, he warned Protestantism against that
dilution and reduction of the gospel which leaves it a trivial, flabby thing."

Eerdmans are to be congratulated on the production of this classic, by
photolithography, in paperback form. It is modestly priced.

Stuart B. Babbage

Guest Professor of Practical

Apologetics and Church History

61

Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of Their Opposition 15584640

By John P. H. New (Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1964).
140 pp. $4.50.

Edward Dowden's classic Puritan and Anglican was published as long
ago as 1900. It consisted of a series of biographical studies. The purpose of
the present work (despite the allusive similarity of the title) is very different:
"The narrow concern here", the author explains, "has been to uncover the
theoretic bases of two antagonistic bodies of opinion". "Anglicanism and
Puritanism were inherited world views, substantially fashioned by the pre-
occupation of their founders."

The author argues that there were matters of fundamental theological
difference from the very beginning. He ignores the fact that the first five
Archbishops of Canterbury Parker, Grindal, Whitgift, Bancroft and
Abbott were all convinced Calvinists, and that it was not until Laud that
Arminianism secured a measure of recognition and acceptance. To ignore
the differences of time and place is hopelessly to muddy the waters of
history.

The author explains that he has adopted an approach "analytical rather
than chronological" avoiding "the problems of historical development".
More's the pity. What we are given is a static interpretation of theological
controversy in a period of catastrophic change. The resultant interpretation
is theologically inept and historically worthless.

Stuart B. Babbage

Guest Professor of Practical

Apologetics and Church History

Society and Love: Ethical Problems of Family Life

By Roger Mehl, translated by James H. Farley (The Westminster
Press, Philadelphia, Pa., 1964). 223 pp. $4.50.

The author of this work occupies the Chair of Ethics on the Faculty of
Protestant Theology at the University of Strasbourg and is an ordained
pastor of the French Reformed Church.

His particular concern is the family and its problems. He discusses these
questions in the light of the Bible and the times in which we live. Of out-
standing value is the author's discussion of "the body and the person".

The author is not preoccupied with matters of physiological detail;
rather, he is concerned with understanding the meaning of marriage and the
family.

This is a refreshing study: a timely corrective to much sociological
writing. What we have, in this important and useful book, is a serious
attempt at theological understanding.

Stuart B. Babbage

Guest Professor of Practical

Apologetics and Church History

62

Ministers of God
By Leon Morris (Inter- Varsity Fellowship, 1964). 128 pp. $1.50.

Dr. Morris served as our colleague at Columbia Theological Seminary
for two terms. In addition to his notable work on the Apostolic Preaching
of the Cross, his prolific pen continues to enrich us with commentaries and
expositions of such relevant themes as the judgment, the Holy Spirit, The
Abolition of Religion and this work on Ministers of God.

Here he shows that the ministry of Christ Himself is the one basic
ministry. His is the only individual priesthood in the Christian Church. His
real and abiding presence in the Church is the supreme ministry of grace.
Other ministers are appointed by Christ to continue His work and thereby
to induce the Church to carry out the same. Thus our ministry has its neces-
sary basis of being in His ministry. By proclaiming Christ, the ministry sets
forward the salvation of men, their incorporation into God's eternal service,
and so redounds to God's glory.

The apostles were not priests and even their ministry is subject to faith-
fulness in the proclamation of the Gospel. Moreover there is very little
evidence that they ordained other ministers. Like T. M. Lindsay and Edward
Schweizer, Morris holds to the fluidity or flexibility of the New Testament
approach to the ministry. He calls upon our several denominations to recog-
nize Christ as the One who commissions each minister, and to exercise
charity in recognizing the ministry of other denominations.

William C. Robinson

Professor of Ecclesiastical History,

Church Polity, and Apologetics

Wait Without Idols

By Gabriel Vahanian (George Briaziller, New York, 1964). 256 pp.
$5.00.

It is refreshing to find a Calvinist bringing the insights of the Reformed
faith to illumine the interpretation of contemporary literature. "Our sole
purpose", the author writes, "has been to illustrate the significance of theo-
logical insights into the nature of man and their rich relevance to an investi-
gation of the domain of literature. And our hope is that these essays in
Christian literary criticism may partly exonerate theology from its cultural
ineptitude and partly redeem literary criticism from the vacuous purpose to
which it often seems to delight in condemning itself."

The author has many wise and helpful things to say. He condemns, for
example, T. S. Eliot's "sacramentarian asceticism". "Eliot cannot tolerate the
creaturely, unless it be abnegated. He cannot conceive of the transcending
presence of God as honoring and transforming the world." There is, he
repeats, in Eliot's poetry a Manichaean dualism. He might, he adds, have

63

spared himself much criticism had he grasped the fuller meaning of the
incarnation.

The author of this stimulating study was born in Marseilles and was a
World Council of Churches' Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary,
where he secured his doctorate. He is now on the faculty of Syracuse
University.

The title of this book is taken from a line by W. H. Auden: "How can
he wait without idols to worship . . . ?" The author quotes Jean Guitton to
the effect that man is essentially an idolater or an "iconoclast" but not an
atheist. The Reformers knew that man is an idol-making machine.

This book is full of illuminating flashes of insight. It is radical, disturbing
and incisive. "Christendom", the author accuses, has substituted "the ac-
commodating complacencies of religiosity for the exigent demands that
accompany the act of faith in a transcendent God".

This book should not be neglected by those who believe (in the words
of T. S. Eliot) that "a Church is to be judged by its intellectual fruits, by its
influence on the sensibility of the most sensitive and on the intellect of the
most intelligent".

Stuart B. Babbage

Guest Professor of Practical

Apologetics and Church History

Church and Metropolis

By Perry L. Norton (The Seabury Press ). 128 pp. $2.95.

What are the demands that the new metropolis is making on the or-
ganized church? A changed pattern of living, the author suggests, requires
a new concept of parish. The church has been slow in responding to this
development; inclined to "adjust" rather than to play a formative role. It
is not the church's function, the author agrees, to solve the economic, social
and political problems of urban society; but it is a function of the church to
witness to the principles of love and justice which must inform every detail
of solution. The writer tends to present the role of the church in sociologi-
cal and ethical terms, with only inferential reference to the church's func-
tion as witness to the Gospel of grace and salvation in Christ.

C. Darby Fulton
Professor of Missions

64

TOURING EUROPE WITH A DIFFERENCE

Dr. Dewitz is inviting interested persons to join him in travel to Europe
during the summer of 1965. "The plan", Dr. Dewitz said, "is to spend 5 J /2
weeks in Europe, beginning with a flight to Paris on June 25. From there
we shall go on to Geneva, Turin (Waldensian Valleys) and Rome. Then by
Deluxe Motor-coach we shall proceed to Florence, Venice, Bolzano, Inns-
bruck, Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart (Tubingen), Heidelberg, Worms, Wies-
baden, and by Rhine steamer to Cologne. Amsterdam, London and Edin-
burgh will be the final points to be visited, flying back to New York on
August 2."

"The difference from other tours lies in the fact that we shall focus on
points of Christian interest. Thus Church History will come alive when we
shall visit the city where Calvin worked, places where the Augsburg Con-
fession was adopted, where Luther faced the Diet of Worms, where the
Pilgrim Fathers worshipped before sailing from Plymouth, where the West-
minster Confession was drawn up, and finally where John Knox stood his
ground before Queen Mary in Edinburgh. A short devotional each morning
should make us realize that we are indeed a group of Christian travellers."

"Furthermore, at times, we hope to meet Christians of other lands in
their homes and churches, spending an evening in fellowship with them."

The cost of the trip will be $1,360.40. For further details write to Dr.
Ludwig R. Dewitz, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.