Page 6391 – Christianity Today (2024)

Emerging from the horrors of World War II, men wondered whether another cycle of uneasy peace would smoulder into further world conflagration, or whether somehow, through the purging of affliction, they had unknowingly passed through darkness toward the dawn. Since the first postwar flush of victory, the latter possibility seems less live than ever. Whatever purging or cleansing effects war may have, they lack enough potency to accomplish the desirable end. Social evils are such that some evangelicals find themselves wondering whether there yet remains on earth the equivalent of “ten righteous in Sodom.” But the so-called “prophets of doom” are not confined to the pulpit. Eminent physicist Edward Teller predicts Russia’s unquestioned world leadership in science ten years from now and sees the world modeled after Russian ideas rather than Western by the end of the century. Men are asking, “For earth, what time is it? Are these still her evolutionary birth pangs, or are we hearing the final cadence of God’s countdown for her history?”

In such an hour CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S 50 contributing editors, scattered around the globe, have been asked to assess the past year’s impact of a purifying Gospel laboring within the toils of a world system with a vast capacity for evil and to relay portents for the immediate and more distant future.

Light shimmers from a distant corner as several contributors rejoice over the signal triumphs of grace manifest in Billy Graham’s Australasian crusades. From the antipodes, Principal Stuart Barton Babbage, of Melbourne’s Ridley College, sounds an apocalyptic note: “In Australia, through the Billy Graham Crusade, we have seen afresh the power of the Gospel, and we have seen the citadels of unbelief challenged and shaken. We thank God and take courage. We believe that, in God’s own time, the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ: that he will reign for ever and ever (Rev. 11:15).” Kansas Professor Fred E. Young, speaking from America’s heartland, sees evangelistic cooperation behind Billy Graham producing for evangelicalism a “status that must be recognized by all groups—secular and religious.” Boston’s Harold John Ockenga writes, “The impact of mass evangelism under the phenomenal leadership of Billy Graham has had its effect upon all camps.”

Dr. Ockenga notes other causes for optimism: “Evangelicalism, after falling into obscurity because of the proliferation under decades of fundamentalist bickering, is emerging to challenge the theological world. A new respect is being gained for its position by the efforts of the younger scholars. Publishing houses like Harper, Macmillan and Scribners, which formerly shied away from evangelical work, are now courting evangelical scholars.…

“There is a change in the intellectual climate of orthodoxy. The present tendency is to repudiate the separatists’ position … to re-examine the problems facing the position of orthodoxy, to return to the theological dialogue and to recognize the honesty and Christianity of those who hold views other than our own.… There is a patent willingness on the part of the new evangelicals to acknowledge the debt to the old fundamentalist leaders who maintained the orthodox position during a time of persecution and discrimination.… There may be a difference of attitude but there is no difference in the creedal content of their Christianity.”

Professor Faris D. Whitesell discerns two evangelical gains: frustration in enlisting church workers to man the “multiplicity of programs and gadgets” has led to greater dependence upon the Holy Spirit; and the forbidding world conditions have influenced evangelical preaching toward a “more serious and biblical mood.” “There has never been so much real Gospel preaching throughout the world as there has been since World War II,” declares Professor J. Theodore Mueller. Dr. Andrew W. Blackwood, author of many books for ministers, writes, “There is among many laymen an increasing desire for preaching from the Bible and for pulpit use of doctrine. Among pastors there is a dawning sense of need for pulpit use of Bible ethics, both for one person and for various groups. As soon as ministers can reserve sufficient time for hard study and private prayer, many of them will learn how to use God’s Written Word in meeting the heart needs of men today. What a golden opportunity for non-belligerent evangelicals!”

Dr. Paul S. Rees believes the past year to have witnessed a growing maturity in evangelical self-awareness and responsibility. “CHRISTIANITY TODAY has more than pulled its weight. Slowly we in the United States are learning the difference between confronting issues and cuffing ears, between informed apologetics and indiscriminate personal attacks.” Dr. Richard C. Halverson points encouragingly to the “spontaneous generation of the fellowship, Bible study, and prayer group movement, with or without organizational sponsorship.” “Many things show that the hosts of the Lord are actively at work,” summarizes Dr. Oswald T. Allis. “Printing press, radio, and television are carrying the Gospel to the ends of the earth; the evangelist with his challenge, ‘The Bible says,’ is reaching the ears of multitudes; age-old injustices of man to man are being righted. God is at work!”

From Great Britain too come heartening reports of evangelical advance. Indeed, ecclesiastical anxiety has been voiced in the British Council of Churches over the resurgence of “a very evangelical form of the Christian faith.” The Archbishop of York recently complained that the Graham crusade in Britain had strengthened fundamentalism. As Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of England, the Rt. Rev. F. P. Copland Simmons has travelled thousands of miles about England and spoken in churches of all the major Protestant denominations the past year. His impression is that “a quiet but vitally important revival” is taking place within the British churches. Though church membership figures remain fairly constant, attendance has been much improved, “finances have doubled, trebled, and (in some cases) quadrupled” and “offers of Christian service have come … in embarrassing numbers.…” “To some of us, this is a real answer to prayer and God’s clear guidance to his Church in the battle with secularism and apathy. The thousands of Bible study and prayer groups, which have arisen lately, are sending men and women back to the reading and study of God’s Word.” Also heartening is the appointment of Contributing Editor F. F. Bruce as Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis on the University of Manchester’s faculty of theology. The Rev. Maurice Wood, President of the Islington Clerical Conference, has been named to a new permanent “Committee on Evangelism” constituted by the Church Assembly of the Church of England. He writes, “The Church of England is remembering once again that if it is to be the Church of the Nation, it must, under God, increasingly become the evangelizing agent of God to the nation.”

Methodist W. E. Sangster sees “no signs yet of wide revival” in Britain, “but evangelicals are taking the growing agnosticism in our land with more seriousness and giving more time to pre-evangelism than they did. Direct evangelism can run both concurrently with it—and consecutively.”

From France, Pierre Marcel writes of a complete change in the fortunes of Calvinism in France—more than a third of the Protestant pastors are members of the Calvinist Society, of which he is vice-president. He is also director of publications of the Reformed Church of France and reports the release of 15 volumes in two years with heartening acceptance by the French public. He notes deficiencies in stewardship and evangelism—“We do not know how to fashion genuine evangelists.”

Dr. Halverson, recently returned from the Orient, sees solid evangelical gains in the Asian churches’ “new awareness” of their evangelistic mission, with “their assumption of its obligation upon the withdrawal of Western dominance,” and also in the “awakening in the Church in Japan coincident with its centiennial.”

But the contributing editors are not oblivious to evangelical shortcomings. Dr. Ned B. Stonehouse, Guest Professor this academic year in the Faculty of Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, observes: “To a large extent evangelicals continue to be impeded by tendencies toward sectarianism, ecclesiasticism and traditionalism. But even where these are largely left behind, the forces at work often appear to be precisely those which are operative in the larger realm of Christendom: tendencies to vagueness or latitudinarianism with regard to the Christian faith, including especially the doctrine of Scripture and that of the Church. Schism and self-righteous isolationism are heinous sins, but unless evangelicalism shows greater evidence of growth in perception of and commitment to the truth, it can hardly hope to meet the threat of secularism to engulf the Church.” Professor Gordon H. Clark hears “no great voice … proclaiming total depravity, election, the atonement, justification, perseverance, and the other major Reformation themes.” Dr. Clyde S. Kilby feels that “some vital element is missing: there is no strong basic intensity, no underlying will to Christian witness.…”

In the area of social responsibility, Dr. Rees charges theological conservatives with being too willing to settle for negations and meek acquiescence in the status quo. “Robust belief in Christ’s coming again needs to be married to an informed concern in the minds of Christians with regard to their citizenship responsibilities.” Director R. Kenneth Strachan, of the Latin America Mission, calls for greater effectiveness in evangelism and education on the part of evangelical missions as they confront communism, Romanism, and nationalism—“they must develop a keener understanding of the social tidal wave.…”

Dr. Ockenga declares the contemporary church’s greatest need to be revival within, for the purification of its life and testimony. Ecclesiastical weaknesses are mirrored in the body politic. Political leaders decry the lack of purpose in American life but are loathe to grapple with spiritual solutions. The London Timesrecently commented on the American substitution of morality-concern for religious interest. Dr. Stonehouse points to the inordinate American preoccupation with science, chiefly motivated by fear of what Russia may do next. He sees the two nations racing “in this process of secularization.” “Is not the Western world moving rapidly away from Christianity?” “The Church’s witness has become largely vague …, doctrinally indifferent, if not blatantly heretical. The widely affirmed disjunction between loyalty to Christ’s person and to ideas about Christ springs from an utterly heretical, non-Christian philosophy. The inclusive church tends to be as broad as the world, and thus a society which is only nominally Christian may be as worldly as one in open allegiance to secularism.”

Dr. Clark looks with disapproval upon certain government trends: “An autocratic state is always a danger to the free propagation of the gospel, and such a tendency in the United States advances with governmental interference in the steel strike (not only by present injunction, but more by previous legislation), with Dr. Blake’s proposal to tax churches, and with the candidacy of John Kennedy for President.” “Khrushchev’s too cordial reception has still further weakened America’s already weak resistance to communism.…”

The contributing editors list many American societal ills stemming from spiritual deficiencies; among others: juvenile delinquency, overemphasis on sex, blatant dishonesty in entertainment, and the continued growth of crime. Professor William Childs Robinson asks: “Have violence and murder become our entertainment and our practice? Has truth fallen in the street, in television and in sport, in our relations one to another?”

Professor Harold B. Kuhn laments the fact that coincidently with the Soviet Union’s appeal to uncommitted peoples through space achievements, “our creative artists—on canvas, on the stage, on the screen, and on the printed page”—are “ingraining decadence at home, and demeaning the United States abroad. One is tempted to ask how long we can afford the ‘luxury’ of this abuse of freedom for the sake of royalties and box office receipts.”

Scientists wonder out loud how long a nation can come in second and still hold first place. What makes a power first class? Intellectuals muse that perhaps a totalitarian nation with a hard core of false convictions may possess greater dynamic than a democracy of varied philosophies. Dr. Rees offers as one description of 1959: “the year when the West was humbled.” “Hidden in the mystery of God’s judgments is the stark fact that in the technological conquest of space those who deny him are out-pacing those who do him lip service. Still, the Hebrew prophets faced something similar. The philosophy of history God taught them needs recovery now: the ‘more wicked’ are used to shatter the pretensions of the ‘less wicked’ who have, nevertheless, more light for which they are accountable.” Speaking of the weakness of the Christian witness, Professor Geoffrey W. Bromiley bemoans the fact that “a nation like the U.S. can still pursue on a large scale wrongly conceived educational policies, and that there is no answer either in the preaching or the lives of Christians to the theoretical or practical materialism which threatens to engulf both East and West.”

Some of the contributing editors tentatively agree with Professor Teller’s predictions as to Russia’s future dominance, although notably Frenchman Pierre Marcel looks for the ultimate supremacy of the U.S. over the U.S.S.R. He accords a strategic role in determining the future course of world history to the faith and works of American Christians. Barring an atomic war, Dr. Earl L. Douglass feels that communism and democracy will greatly modify each other within 50 to 100 years.

General William K. Harrison sees social evil and the anti-biblical nature of much that passes for Christianity both calling forth the wrath of God. “This time I believe that wrath will be the Great Tribulation so clearly prophesied in the Bible.”

Professor Bernard Ramm is daily confronted with two items: the mystery of iniquity and the triumph of the Gospel. Despite communism and anti-missionary nationalism, he expects to see fully “as much triumph of the Gospel as there is evident mystery in iniquity. The fiery furnace, the blooded sword, and the imperial decree have never yet extinguished the gospel or the Church; and I do not expect them to do so in our generation.”

Dr. Bromiley is “not unhopeful” that by the end of the century “we may see the fruition” of many evangelical movements now in early stages. “God may confound our present estimate of their inadequacy as he takes our little and makes it much.”

Dr. Cary N. Weisiger, III, sets the present task within its eschatological orientation. “With the world’s population multiplying at a frightening rate and the possibility of world evangelization seemingly more difficult, we can pray, witness and serve courageously if we keep looking for that blessed hope, the glorious appearing of Jesus Christ.” Anglican Maurice Wood sees the combination of shallowness within a “mixed church” (wheat and tares, Mt. 13:24–30) along with increasing missionary endeavor as indicative of the nearness of Christ’s return. He pleads for a greater evangelistic effort as does Dr. Sangster, who describes this as our plain duty regardless of the lack of unanimity among British evangelicals (he could have added American) as to “whether the world will soon end in a holocaust or continue for many centuries.”

When a man stands in the arid Kidron Valley, he is on apocalyptic ground. Both Jews and Moslems believe this to be the site of the Last Judgment. Moslem tombs are on one side, Jewish tombs on the other. The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, is but a continuation of Kidron. In one direction the observer looks up to see the tawny wall of Jerusalem, city of history’s most horrifying event. But happily he may turn and lift his eyes to the Mount of Olives, scene of the Ascension with its steeling words: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations …: I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” And the white-robed men said, “This same Jesus … shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.”

Whatever the hour on God’s clock, the ultimate triumph is secure. But the countdown is not yet ended … and there is yet work.…

READING REQUIREMENTS IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN SEMINARIES

The Christian theological institutions of Southeast Asia have been presented with a preliminary and tentative listing of books for guidance in stocking their libraries. The work of Dr. Raymond P. Morris, professor of religious literature and librarian at Yale University, the list aims to suggest “a good collection of books,” and an up-to-date research library will do well to give heed to it.

Fortunately, however, the compilation disowns any intention of selecting the “best” or definitive books, or even of proposing a core library. It simply provides a “prompter” sheet (of 154 pages), highly useful as such, but not without deficiencies in its reflection of historic evangelical Christianity.

This defect becomes the more apparent if one keeps an eye on the volumes designated by an asterisk as “books considered by the compiler as of unusual value for the purposes of this list.” Apart from the omission of distinctively evangelical works worthy of inclusion (B. B. Warfield’s writings are excluded, as is the five-volume International Standard Bible Encyclopedia edited by James Orr), the section on “Christianity and Other Religions” seems woefully weak. Under “Dictionaries and Encyclopedias” Southeast Asian librarians are prophetically informed that “the forthcoming Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary … and the forthcoming revised Dictionary of the Bible by Hastings, may be expected to supersede older English Bible dictionaries.” No mention is made of the forthcoming Dictionary of Theology by evangelical scholars. The section on the “Authority of the Bible” is marked by its absence of volumes defending the high and historic view. The Interpreter’s Bible is specially commended. The listings seem frequently to defer to critical schools of thought now widely under challenge in scholarly circles. One will search the recommended list of commentaries on specific Old Testament books almost in vain for a reference to consistently evangelical works, although in the New Testament sections some older works survive from previous generations, while contemporary evangelical scholarship is virtually ignored. J. Gresham Machen’s classic works on The Virgin Birth of Christ and The Origin of Paul’s Religion do not appear. In the few places where evangelical works are included, the theological standpoint of the list apparently requires special indicia of caution; F. F. Bruce’s The Acts of the Apostles gains the explanation: “Conservative.” Liberal and neo-orthodox works are not specially designated.

We are not suggesting that the Yale list is valueless. A competent library reference room must consider the great bulk of these works if it is shelved with care. Nor do we charge that the list is anti-evangelical. Some evangelical works are included, even in the section on contemporary theological thought, and these selections are worthy. But the list is heavily weighted in the liberal and neo-orthodox directions, and it does not really reflect the weight of evangelical scholarship in our century any more than it does full justice to historic biblical Christianity. The kindest verdict would be that the list lacks objectivity. One may hope that it will not serve finally as a basis for approving theological libraries of Southeast Asia as adequate for “accredited institutions,” since it weights essential reading matter in the direction of theological bias at the expense of the evangelical heritage to which the foreign missions enterprise owes its very life.

From an additional standpoint the Yale list, in its present form, seems regrettable. In our generation evangelical schools have been striving more and more to reflect alien points of view with fairness and accuracy, and not simply to condemn them on bias. An examination of evangelical institutions will disclose that their libraries incorporate proportionately more literature reflective of modern theological deviations than theologically-inclusive centers include of the competent evangelical literature of the day. Evangelical institutions have awakened to the fact that historic Christianity has nothing to fear from any quarter, and that the critical assaults upon it are soon deflated. But it would hardly serve the cause of Christian unity in our day were the theological seminaries of the Occident to be reinforced at the expense of evangelical Christianity. What is needed is not simply a grudging supplementation of the Yale list. Perhaps some agency like Evangelical Theological Society could be invited to designate competent evangelical literature worthy of inclusion in the reference reading of Southeast Asians in a time of growing evangelical concern and evangelistic urgency.

THE BLOOD OF CHRIST

Running through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation are multiplied references to sacrifices and blood.

The New Testament references to “the blood of Christ” are so numerous and specific that they in themselves constitute a theology of redemption.

That the doctrine of the blood atonement is attacked and rejected as a “slaughter house religion” by many is a matter of deep concern. If the shed blood of Calvary has no relationship to God’s redemptive act, then men should know it. If allusions to Christ’s blood, and faith in its saving efficacy, are “offensive”, and on this assumption to be eliminated from Christian doctrine, we should know on what authority such action is being taken.

I have before me letters which deplore in the strongest terms a concept of God which requires the sacrifice of his Son for the sins of the world.

These letters speak of such beliefs as “sadistic,” “revolting,” “outrageous,” “atonement of retaliation,” “masochism,” and other vigorous terms.

Little is to be gained by engaging in polemics. To me the decision must center in the revelation which God has given us of himself and his Son through the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures.

Here we are confronted with the holiness and justice of a God who is utterly righteous, and we see the great mercy of the same God who is love.

The Bible tells us that the sacrifices of the Old Testament were types and symbols of the death of Christ on the Cross, and the New Testament affirmations about the blood shed on Calvary require us to take them in their rightful context and accept them as the inspired explanation of the central event of all history. Where we fail to understand all that is implied is our fault and not the fault of God’s plan.

The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews speaks of the tabernacle service as symbolic of Christ’s atoning work; and he further states: “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. For if the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Before such a statement how can we refrain from bowing our hearts in humble thankfulness for what Christ has done?

This same writer says: “He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?” This to me is evidence of the overwhelming importance of God’s holy provision for my sins and also the awfulness of sin which made such provision necessary.

The blood which flowed at Calvary was real blood. The implication and effect of that blood is for all ages, and becomes real and precious to us through faith.

Our Lord, in instituting the sacrament of remembrance, says: “For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”

The Apostle Paul, in his meeting with the Ephesian elders, speaks of “the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood”; while to the church in Rome he writes: “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood.… Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.”

What is the significance of this blood that runs like a red line through the story of redemption?

Noah was warned against eating “flesh with the life thereof, which is the life thereof.” Equating blood with life is fully compatable with the concept of our Lord’s giving his life for the redemption of mankind.

In our own scientific age there are thousands living today who owe their lives to blood transfusions. By analogy, it can be reverently said that, in a mystical sense, the Son of God is the great universal Donor, giving new life to the sinner who trusts in His shed blood for cleansing.

The implications of his blood are inexhaustable in their effect on those who accept new life in Christ.

We have redemption through his blood, and it is this same blood which brings us near to God. Paul reminds the Ephesian Christians of their former state—“having no hope, and without God in the world”; and then he says: “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”

To the Christians in Colosse he tells of God’s good pleasure that in Christ “should all fullness dwell” and immediately speaks of the work of Christ in these words: “And having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself.”

The Apostle Peter is equally emphatic with reference to the blood of Christ in telling us that our redemption is not purchased by silver or gold, “but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”

John, the beloved apostle, in speaking of Christians walking in the light of the Lord and in the fellowship which this makes possible, says: “And the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”

We find this same theme in the book of Revelation where we are told: “Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood …”; “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people and nation.”

In all of this we are confronted by a great mystery. This side of eternity none of us can know the full implication of God’s great act of redemption in Christ. To rationalize either the nature of sin or the cost and means of our salvation is to toy with destruction itself. It is not for man to argue with his Maker. To let one’s philosophical preconceptions separate him from God’s provision of eternal life is folly at its worst.

We live in a day of great sophistication. It is not easy to humble our hearts, minds, and wills and submit them to God; but there is great reward to those who say from a yearning heart: “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.”

“What can wash away my sins,

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

Is not this a time when we might well exchange some of our theological sophistication for the simplicity of a by-gone day?

L. NELSON BELL

When a man is asked to write an article on Confucianism, his immediate question is: “Which Confucianism? Now, of course, it is genetically true of every religion that it has many aspects. Always there is the distinction between the religion of the “fundamentalist” and the religion of the “liberal”: always there is the contrast between the lofty but nebulous creed of the philosopher and the workaday faith of the plain man. Yet of no religion is this more true than of Confucianism, which at certain levels ceases altogether to be a religion in any sense of the word. Instead, it becomes at once an ethical system and a pattern of life. Curiously enough, this tendency, which might at first seem to be its weakness, has proved to be its strength in old age; for in the twentieth century, with the collapse of the organized Confucian cult, Confucianism still persists. It survives not only as a deliberately chosen way of life, but even more as an unselfconscious, pervasive attitude of mind, which is, by one of the ironies of history, more common now in the Western world than in the Eastern. Therefore, among the world’s religions, the study of Confucianism is still valid, though today there are no sacrifices or incense burned before the tablets or statue of the sage K’ung Ch’iu, better known to the West by his honorific title of “K’ung the Maestro,” K’ung Fu-Tzu, early Latinized as Confucius.

RECOVERING THE FOUNDER

This collapse of the cult has a certain appropriateness. Confucius was no Confucianist, and would certainly have deplored such virtual deification. It is doubly appropriate that there is nowadays a renewed interest on all sides in Confucius the man, for it is first as a man, and second as a teacher that he has left an abiding mark on the East. For millennia he has been regarded as an expert in “lifemanship,” to use a useful neologism from contemporary humorists; and it is as such that others have looked to him for guidance.

Setting aside then those works which are mere “debunking” in the modern tradition, and those “higher critical” studies which deny Confucius any independent existence, we find remaining many recent studies which represent a serious attempt to recover the man himself, to see him directly instead of through endless stacks of commentaries, as has been his fate for two thousand years at least. For the serious student, Creel’s books will repay study. For an easy, readable, yet scholarly exposition of the modern “slant,” the busy pastor could not do better than read the paperback copy, A Short History of Confucian Philosophy, by Liu Wu-Chi (Penguin Books, 1955).

On the writer’s shelf before him are two small Chinese books, taken at random, which serve as a reminder that this revival of interest in Confucius is by no means confined to the somewhat artificial atmosphere of Western universities with their departments of Chinese studies. Were this so, it would indicate that Confucianism was already dead and had reached the point of being worthy of study as a branch of “spiritual archaeology,” like the religion of the Incas or the Totemism of precolonial New England. No, these books, and numerous others, are written in a living situation, to meet a living need. One book is titled, A New Discussion of Confucianism, by Ch’en Chien-Fu, and the other is Criticism of Confucian Philosophy, by Chang Shen-Ch’ieh, published in Formosa in 1953 and 1954 respectively.

CONFUCIAN WAYS OF THOUGHT

Now, in spite of what detractors may read into the last clause of this sentence, such continued study of Confucius in the periphery of the Chinese world is not mere “stubborness,” nor can it be dismissed as merely “reactionary”—although it is true that Confucianism was as much a part of Old China as the Orthodox Church was of prerevolutionary Russia. Such books are published not simply because Confucianism was part of the old and loved as such; they are published because, for better or worse, Confucianism was the motor spring of the old. If the old is to survive in the same recognizable form, it must therefore be with this motivation. The Chinese of the Dispersion may dress and eat like the Americans or Australians around them without ceasing in any way to be thoroughly Chinese; but once they cease to live by Confucian ways of thought, then they cease to be distinctively Chinese. Thus the resuscitation of Confucianism, no doubt artificial in some of its aspects, is not alone a conscious protest against that un-Chinese way of life which is communism; it is equally an incoherent protest against the invasion of the old China by all modern corrosive values. As Christians, we may well see dangers in this attitude, for the Gospel is certainly a solvent, if not a corrosive. As realists, we may feel it a vain attempt to plug the dikes of modern thought; but we must at least try to understand it.

CRITICISM ON TWO FRONTS

So Confucius, like some modern King Canute, is doughtily fighting on two “fluid fronts” today. The materialistic Western world “debunks” him, or considers him hopelessly impractical. The Communist world simply points to him, shrugs its shoulders, and says in effect, “There you are—we told you so!” No need for “debunking” so far as they are concerned (although there have been some very crude attacks on him); he is already the quintessence of all that communism opposes. He is feudalistic to his backbone; he is aristocratic in the true sense of that maligned word. Worse still, he holds incurably “bourgeois” concepts of virtues and vices. The maligned hymn verse, “God made them high and lowly, He ordered their estate,” would have found a stout defender in Teacher K’ung. He would have stood for no egalitarian nonsense, though his sense of superiority might be measured in terms of learning or virtue as well as birth. He would have accepted as axiomatic the attribution of such strata to Providence if not to a personal God, whereat the Communist would again shrug his shoulders, in helplessness and in triumph. In the Communist’s mind, Confucius belongs to a paternalistic age, past and outmoded, and there is no need to attack him now. They may condescend to use him at times as an example of good vulgar proletarian virtues that peep shyly through the rents of a fur-lined bourgeois gown, much the same way Nazi Germany was pleased to use Martin Luther as a national figure long after they had denied him his position as religious leader.

EPITOME OF THE OLD NATURE

The attitude of the Communists to Confucius is not, of course, important to us except insofar as we may ask ourselves whether they were right in regarding Confucius as the epitome of the Old China, the destruction of which they felt to be their immediate mission in the East. If that was the case, then we have a valuable confirmation of the view of the Chinese periphery—that Confucius is the very matrix from which came traditional China with all its weakness and strength. But we as Christians ought to carry this analysis further. Confucius is to us not only the epitome of Old China, but of old natural man—lovable, inconsistent, easygoing, with a neat pattern of virtues and vices, rights and duties, and regarding the whole of life as a pattern of human relationships. Thus it is that for the man educated by the old “classical” system, the transition from Greece and Rome to Confucius is easy and natural; he is conscious of no break because there is none. Confucius breathes the same air and oves with the same grace and dignity as the Olympians. He finds an answering, if unwilling, echo in us all simply because he is the fine flowering of all that is best in the old pagan world. In other words, he is something of our father. In our hasty Christian rejection of the pagan world, we do well to remind ourselves that there are worse things than a good pagan. We can recollect with humility that it was not even Christian theology that swept Parnassus from the educational curriculum, but statics, dynamics, and physics—that worthy trinity of the Machine Age. Communism denies, as sheer subjective folly, the “ought feelings” that were self-evident to Confucius, as indeed they were to most Western philosophers and moralists until recent centuries.

THE NEO-PAGAN COPY

But communism is not alone in this denial: the neo-pagan of the modern West, for all his antipathy to communism, yet agrees with it here. And is this modern pagan in any way preferable, from the evangelical Christian point of view, to the traditional Confucian type of pagan?

If, from this point of view, we should be tempted to consider Teacher K’ung as a Christian ally, we must remember that, as Christians, we can none of us believe in the inherent goodness and decency of man. As an explicit doctrine, this is more characteristic of Mencius who played a Chinese Aristotle to the Confucian Plato; but it is an ever-present, yet unexpressed element in every Confucian syllogism, be it in philosophy or ethics.

So, in the twentieth century, the Sage has no ally—Marxist, Western materialist, or Christian theologian. Canute has stemmed the waves all in vain; the Chinese of tomorrow, whether inside or outside the Bamboo Curtain, can scarcely be a true Confucianist. He must instead choose between two brands of materialism, unless indeed he has come to that complete distrust of man and complete trust in God which is Christian faith.

Where, then, does Confucianism live? It lives unconsciously in the hearts of many an educated “decent pagan” of the West who has absorbed insensibly certain moral standards from the pervasive Christianity of which he knows little and wants to know less. Wherever the old liberal humanism prevails, with its tranquil and deluding beliefs about the nature of Man—there Confucianism lives, recognized or unrecognized. Good-natured pagans, dignified and cultured, coming from the “best” of families, going to the “best” colleges, secure and confident in their own benevolent “mission,” still dressing for dinner as did the ship founders beneath them—these are the true sons and daughters of Confucius. The fondness of the modern world for translations of Confucius shows that at least some of these pagans recognize the pit from which they have been dug, and the rock from which they have been hewn.

Alan Cole is a native of Dublin, Ireland, and holds the B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, and the B.D. and M.Th. degrees from King’s College, London. After teaching at Oak Hill Theological College, London, and Moore Theological College, Sydney, he went to the mission field in 1952. Currently he is engaged in a Lay Leaders’ Training Scheme of “Schools of Discipleship” in Singapore Diocese.

Buddhism originated in the life, teaching, and personality of a remarkable Indian sage, Siddhartha Gautama, the son of a petty king whose capital was at Kapilavasta in northern India. The life span of Gautama, who is called Buddha or “Enlightened One,” is usually reckoned as about 560–480 B.C.

According to traditional accounts, at the age of 29 Gautama saw in succession a decrepit old man, a dead body, a diseased person, and a calm recluse. Shocked by these “Four Passing Sights” and filled with a yearning to find release from the inevitable misery of existence, he forsook his sheltered life of luxury and left behind his beautiful wife and young son to become a recluse.

After trying various Hindu ways of salvation, Gautama adopted a rigorous asceticism involving such extreme fasting that his body wasted away to skin and bones. Rejecting this fanaticism for a “middle way” between self-mortification and self-indulgence, he began to eat again; and shortly thereafter, while seated in meditation, he attained “enlightenment”—he became a Buddha.

Soon Gautama had made the important decision to share his experience with others. He began to preach, and his first converts were five former disciples who had forsaken him when he had renounced extreme asceticism. Other conversions followed, and before long a brotherhood of 60 monks had resulted with Gautama at the head. Thus a new religion was born.

This Buddhist faith flourished for a few centuries in India until through certain circumstances it became practically extinct in the land of its birth. Meantime, however, it had divided into two main branches and had effected a missionary expansion which was to give it continued existence in many Asiatic countries.

Today, the Theravada (or Hinayana) branch of Buddhism predominates in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. The Mahayana branch prevails in China, Tibet, and Japan, and to lesser extent in Viet Nam and Korea.

Estimates of Buddhist membership vary widely, but a Buddhist writer has indicated recently that 150,000,000 is “the figure which has a wide acceptance” (H. Nakamura in Kenneth Morgan, ed., The Path of the Buddha, Roland Press, 1956, p. 364).

Between the two major divisions of Buddhism there are fundamental agreements but also deep differences, although quite recently they have reached some measure of union in the World Fellowship of Buddhists. The motivation of this union seems to be a new awareness of world mission.

This illustrates the fact that just within the last decade or so Buddhism has become “a self-conscious missionary faith” addressing itself to the Western world.

CLAIMS TO WORLD FAITH

What claims can Buddhism make as a world faith in the contemporary situation? It can truthfully assert that in common with other high religions it has inculcated lofty ethical standards, such as honesty, sexual morality, and sobriety. It can point to its noble ideal of compassion for all sentient beings.

Actually, at the heart of Buddhist missionary propaganda is the contention that not Christianity but Buddhism is the religion of peace. Buddhists point to the record of wars and controversies of Christendom and the use of atom bombs by Christians. They insist that Buddhism has a much better record than Christianity concerning religious tolerance. In an article published in Ceylon, a Buddhist has charged that “Christianity is based and built upon the idea of vengeance” (Edmund Perry, The Gospel in Dispute, Doubleday, 1958, p. 211).

The sting in these words is not relieved by the fact that we Christians know this to be a very inadequate, though understandable, judgment upon our faith. It is possible, of course, to show that Buddhism has not been entirely free from intolerance, that Buddhist tolerance has often meant lack of zeal, and that Buddhists claim too much for their religion’s opposition to war. But it surely behooves Christians to look at our own record with repentance and with the determination to prove that Christ is truly the Prince of Peace.

Buddhism must be confronted and evaluated, however, not in terms of isolated elements of its missionary apologetic but as a total religious system. It is possible to see in Buddhism’s ideal of compassion and concern for peace some evidences that God has not left himself entirely without witness in the Buddhist world. But it is likewise true that the world view and basic presuppositions of Buddhism are irreconcilable with the uniquely authoritative revelation in Jesus Christ.

Over against the Christian faith in a personal God, who is Creator and Redeemer, stands the Buddhist denial of such a Deity. Buddhists often call themselves atheists, though at least in Mahayana the profession of atheism must be seen as one of a dialectic whereby the existence of objective realities is denied so that the great Buddha Reality may be affirmed. It is perhaps correct to include both branches of Buddhism in the category of identity-mysticism, since in either case there is ultimate absorption of the individual into the Absolute, whether this Absolute be conceived as the Cosmic Buddha Mind or Spirit (as in Mahayana) or hardly subject to any positive definition (as in Theravada).

Opposed to the Christian view of the universe as created by God and moving toward the goal of his gracious purpose in Jesus Christ is the Buddhist concept of samsara, which means the endless (unless broken by Nirvana) chain of rebirths of individuals in successive existences and of universes in world cycles. According to this view, every existence depends upon a previous one and the present universe evolved out of the dispersed matter of a former universe. Buddhist statements of this doctrine of “dependent origination” sometimes resemble the writings of modern scientists (cf. Perry, op. cit., p. 203). But the inadequacy of the Buddhist view as a religious explanation of the world may certainly be questioned; for not only does it fail to discover a First Cause, but, unlike modern science, it specifically denies its possibility.

To the Christian this view robs history of its meaning, rendering it self-contained and without a goal. And if one adds to this the concepts of impermanence and nonsubstance which are basic to Buddhism, he finds it well nigh impossible to maintain the reality of the phenomenal world as well as history. Mahayana teaches the doctrine of sunyata, which is the void or emptiness, indicating that all things are but appearance. Although in a profound dialectical interpretation sunyata is understood positively as all-inclusiveness and indeed as the metaphysical equivalent of love, it looks very much like the reappearance of the Hindu maya or illusion by which phenomenal realities are denied. At any rate, it is incompatible with the historical and phenomenal realism of Christian faith.

This whole concept of samsara must be a matter of faith for the Buddhist, since it can neither be proved nor disproved scientifically. This is recognized by an erudite Buddhist, at least concerning individual transmigration, when he admits that “the doctrine of transmigration does not seem to enjoy any scientific support” (D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, Harper, 1957, p. 121).

THE DOCTRINE OF KARMA

The Christian is all the more troubled by the doctrine of karma which underlies the concept of transmigration. Karma is the law of cause and effect whereby one’s actions in a given incarnation determine his character and the state of his future existence. This Hindu concept was retained by Gautama and is still an important part of Buddhist religion. It is not only impossible of scientific verification but is morally offensive even to some Indians.

It is true that Buddhism offers ultimate escape from the clutches of karma by the experience of Nirvana, which literally means “the blowing out” or “the absence of craving” but is interpreted by Buddhists as the positive experience of “emancipation.” In the mystical enlightenment of Nirvana the power of karma is broken, but karma itself contains no hint of Cosmic Forgiveness or Regenerative Power and is too mechanical and merciless to represent Cosmic Justice in a world of persons.

On pragmatic grounds, the belief in karma may be criticized for having hindered the implementation of Buddhist compassion. One might have expected that Buddhism’s concentration upon suffering as the central problem of life would have led to a robust effort at the relief of human misery and the correction of wrong social structures which breed and nurture it. As a matter of historical fact, however, organized efforts at social service on the part of Buddhists (e.g., the creation of hospitals and the like) appear scattered and desultory when compared to those of Christians; and where Buddhism has not been appreciably influenced by Christianity it has shown practically no concern for social reform. It is significant that in a volume of essays in which Buddhist scholars attempt to interpret their religion to the Western world (Morgan, ed., op. cit.), no reference is made to social reform, although attention is given to service and compassion. This deficiency is all the more regrettable when it is remembered that original Buddhism was revolutionary, at least to the extent of obliterating caste and including women in the monastic order.

THE MEANING OF COMPASSION

The Buddhist remedy for suffering is not the changing of conditions which produce and perpetuate human misery but the individual enlightenment of the sufferer. He is to understand that desire is the cause of suffering and that the eradication of desire in the experience of Nirvana is its cure.

Enlightenment is certainly important, especially if it is based on truth and reality; but it is never sufficient to satisfy the social concern of the Christian who stands under the judgment of the kingdom of God and has the compassion for persons he has learned at the Cross.

Yet Buddhism also is a religion of compassion, and it is at this point that it moves closest to Christianity. The Buddhist ideal is universal, all-embracing love for all beings. In Theravada Buddhism the motivation for this compassion is the desire to produce good karma and to express one’s identity with all that lives (Thittila, op. cit., pp. 94–96). In Mahayana, compassion seems more definitely based upon the self-sacrifice of Gautama the Buddha and of other Buddha-like beings or Bodhisattvas who have delayed the full enjoyment of Nirvana or Buddhahood in order to save others.

From the Christian standpoint, however, identity-mysticism tends to vitiate the Buddhist motivation to compassion. The import of the profound Mahayana doctrine of the Threefold Body of the Buddha is that phenomenal reality is but a secondary expression of the void or Absolute Reality; and the compassion or self-sacrifice of the Buddha Mind which is Ultimate Reality is actually “the impartial acceptance of all things as expressions of itself” (T. N. Callaway, Japanese Buddhism and Christianity. Tokyo: Shinkyo Shuppansha, 1959, p. 221). World salvation, therefore, is the Buddha Mind’s realization of itself. Likewise, the compassion of an enlightened Buddhist or a Bodhisattva is not loving service to other individual selves but acceptance of things as they are in the realization that ultimately there is no self to be sacrificed and no other to be served (ibid., pp. 219, 222; cf. Nakamura, op. cit., pp. 381, 395–396).

In the identity-mysticism of Buddhism there is no basis then for the salvation of society. There is nothing at all analogous to the great social ideal of the kingdom of God and the Church as the Body of Christ. And what looks like the self-sacrifice of Ultimate Reality (resembling the Cross) turns out to be more self-realization than self-sacrifice, and in any case mythical.

A young Japanese Buddhist once asked me the question: “If I should become a Christian, would I have to renounce my Buddhist heritage which I respect and appreciate deeply?” I replied something like this: “I too respect your Buddhist heritage and would regret to see it all renounced. Rather, I hope that in Jesus Christ you will find a new object of supreme devotion and a transforming experience by which you will see your religious heritage with new eyes. In His light some of your heritage will be negated but much will be transformed and fulfilled.”

Edwin Luther Copeland is Professor of Missions in South-eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina. Formerly a Southern Baptist missionary to Japan, he taught at the Seinan Gakuin University from 1949–56. He holds the B.A. from Furman University, the Th.M. from Southern Baptist Seminary, and the Ph.D. from Yale.

Hinduism is indeed a shoreless sea. It includes within itself everything from the highest and most abstract philosophy down to the crudest superstition. And this does not in any way disturb the average thoughtful Hindu—it is to him evidence of the largeness and splendor of the religious system to which he gives his allegiance.

To all Hindus, the scriptures of highest authority are the four Vedas. These, which are among the most ancient of all literary monuments (older than Homer, and about of the same age as the Song of Deborah in the Old Testament), were the product of that lively and vigorous people, the Aryans, at the time of their first invasion of India. Yet, though they possess such unquestioned authority for the Hindu, they are mainly concerned with gods whom no one any longer worships—Varuna the outspread heaven, Agni the sacred fire, Ushas (Aurora) the dawn—and they contain not a trace of any of the most characteristic doctrines of later Hinduism. Then follow the immensely complicated ritual rules of the Brahmanas, the foundation of much of the ritual that is still practiced in classical Hinduism today. Next come the Upanishads, marking the beginning of critical philosophy, and that understanding of the world that is summed up in the saying Tat tvam asi, “that art thou,” the soul in man is the same as the soul of the universe; separate existence is an illusion from which man needs to be freed. There follows the whole range of the bhakti-forms of Hinduism, in which the worshiper chooses one of the many gods as the object of his special and devoted adoration and finds release through this worship. At one side are the Tantric rites, glorifications of the powers of fertility in nature, which by Western standards are gross and immoral in the extreme. There are the animistic beliefs and practices of the village dwellers, largely taken up with the propitiation of evil spirits. All this is to be included under the comprehensive term “Hinduism.”

Can we then discern any particular doctrine, the following of which will make a man a Hindu, as belief in Jesus Christ will make a man a Christian? The official answer is, No. If a man has been born in a Hindu caste and has not separated himself from it, if on the whole he observes its rules and the minimum practices of worship, no one can deny to him the name of Hindu and any privileges that may go with it.

THE ACCEPTANCE OF KARMA

But, in point of fact, there is one basic belief that runs through almost every form of Hinduism and is so nearly universal that it may be taken almost as the sign-manual of a creed. This is the belief in Karma, retribution, and the endless transmigration of souls from one life to another in this world. All action tends to tie the soul to the wheel of existence. Evil action creates a debt which must be paid; if it cannot be paid off in this life, then it must be worked off in another life; and the soul is tied to separate existence until every debt is paid. Forgiveness is impossible. If it were possible, it would be immoral, since not even God must interfere with the rta, the established moral order of the world on which all depends. To the Hindu this truth is self-evident; it is the explanation for all the suffering and inequality in the world. If it tends to a fatalistic attitude to life—things are what they are as the consequences of an unknown past and are therefore unchangeable—at the same time it gives men a quiet courage and resignation in the face of misfortune that are admirable.

We must first pay tribute to the strength and excellences of the Hindu way of life. Every man has a status in society which is determined for him by his caste. He has duties to perform and a close-knit community on which he can depend for mutual help and service. Religion is linked to his life at every point, by the recurring festivals, by the minute regulation of custom as to what he shall eat and what he shall wear—all related to religious sanctions. The West may object to the crippling of individual effort that results from the caste system and the exclusion of the so-called untouchables from every kind of privilege. (Untouchability has now been abolished by law, though in practice things in the villages remain much as they were.) The Hindu can point to the extraordinary stability of a society which has survived two thousand years of change, invasion, occupation by hostile powers, and yet remains essentially what it was before the Christian faith was born.

ENCOUNTERING THE GOSPEL

When Hinduism first encountered the Gospel, there were two sharply differing reactions. On the one hand, there were those, such as the reformers Ram Mohan Roy and Keshab Chunder Sen, who accorded delighted welcome to almost everything in the teaching of Jesus, believed that the regeneration of India could come about only through the acceptance of Christian ideas, but never felt it necessary to join a church or cease to be Hindus. The other attitude was that of vigorous and definite rejection of everything that came from the West. Both these attitudes can still be observed and are widespread among Hindus. But the syncretistic tendencies of Hinduism and the ease with which it can absorb elements from outside itself have made a certain amount of toleration for Christian ideas natural among educated Indians, and have led many to adopt without discomfort or sense of contradiction Christian views which are hardly compatible with Hindu principles as these have been understood in the past.

A notable exponent of this tolerant and in part welcoming attitude is Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, at the time of writing vice-president of the Indian Republic, and formerly professor of Eastern religions at Oxford. He has a wide acquaintance with philosophical thought in all its forms, and is well acquainted both with the Bible and with the writings of well-known Christian theologians of the West.

His starting point is that the ultimate reality is beyond the reach of man’s knowledge. No religious system can therefore claim to be unique, final, and complete; but value is not to be denied to any of the religious systems in which man has sought to find peace and harmony with the universe. All religions should engage in a common search for truth, in the spirit of fellowship and without mutual condemnation. To say that all religions have value is not to say that all are of equal value. We may, in fact, tentatively draw up a kind of hierarchical order. At the top will come those forms of faith which recognize that the supreme reality is ultimately impersonal and unknowable. Here the finest example yet known to us is that of classical Hindu philosophy. Next come those systems which hold to the unity of God, but find it congenial to accept the idea of God as personal (and rightly, since God who is impersonal in the mysterious depths of his own being may by condescension have also a personal side which he shows to us). In this class we find Judaism and Islam. On the third level are the religions of incarnation, where human weakness demands a personal and human object of veneration. Christianity obviously falls into this third class, together with the bhakti-forms of Hindu religion. On the fourth level are the idolatrous forms of worship, where a visible object of worship is demanded. And finally we encounter those forms of superstition in which it is hard to find a gleam of true religion.

Again to say that all religions have value does not debar us either from attempting ourselves to find the highest form available to us, or to teach others in the attempt to help them rise from a lower to a higher level of understanding of the truth. But all such attempts must be made in the true spirit of tolerance and mutual respect. No undue influence must be exercised, and every gleam of truth that is found in any system must be respected and maintained.

CHRIST AND THE WHOLE OF LIFE

This is a charming picture, and probably would be accepted by many Hindus as the expression of their own point of view. It makes possible a deep regard for Jesus as Teacher (some would even go so far as to say Saviour, in the sense that Jesus is one of the Saviours of the world), in combination with complete loyalty to the traditions and demands of the Hindu order. Yet there are signs that some Hindus are finding the maintenance of this balance more difficult than they had expected. Faith in Christ, like the Hindu order, covers the whole of life, and is totalitarian in its claims. Membership in the Church is not an optional addition to faith in Christ. As Christians have been learning increasingly in recent years, the Church is part of the Gospel, and membership in it is part of faith. It may be that the friendly Hindu has been accepting the Gospel as he would like it to be and not as it really is. If he begins to submit to Jesus as the New Testament presents him, he may find the consequences gravely disturbing.

For one thing, he will find that Hinduism is splendidly tolerant towards other faiths and their adherents but is not at all tolerant towards those who would leave their Hindu faith and adopt another in its entirety, as a Hindu does when he accepts baptism into the Christian Church.

It is for this reason that the preaching of the New Testament Gospel is and must always be a scandal to the Hindu. In order to tell the truth, the Christian preacher must challenge Hindu ideas at seven crucial points:

1. He must set forth the idea of creation—that this visible world though marred by sin is essentially good, and is the scene of the working out of one divine purpose through the ages.

2. He must steadfastly affirm that God is personal, that our relation to him is that of persons to Person, and that to attempt to rise above such a relationship means inevitable to fall below it.

3. This being so, sin cannot primarily be interpreted in terms of debt, and in relation only to the one who has done the wrong; it is always an affront to the majesty of God and an injury to his love.

4. Redemption, then, is not deliverance from the burden of rebirth, but a new relationship with God, which can find expression only in those categories of forgiveness that Hinduism has rejected.

5. History is not meaningless, since it is within history that the great act of redemption has taken place in a historic person, Jesus Christ.

6. The work of Jesus is to be continued in a beloved community, which is to be drawn from all races and peoples, and membership within which depends only on faith in him outwardly expressed in baptism. This community is open to all, but does not automatically include all.

7. The final goal of Christian faith is not absorption into the Deity, but an endless reality of personal existence in perfected fellowship with a loving Father.

Each of these points is, from the Hindu point of view, scandalous. The loving and convincing presentation of them to the Hindu is a task of endless difficulty.

SOME NEW PERSPECTIVES

Three things in recent years have opened new perspectives for the preaching of the Gospel in India.

The first is the example of Mr. Gandhi. His well-known devotion to the Gospels and to the person of Jesus Christ must have led countless Hindus to throw away inherited prejudice, and to prepare themselves for an encounter with Jesus Christ. But Mr. Gandhi was at the same time the greatest foe of Christian missions. He steadily advised all his friends that they could find all that they needed for their spiritual life without ceasing to be Hindus, and discouraged baptism as treachery to the will of God which has caused this man and that to be born a Hindu.

Secondly, political independence has given the Indian a new sense of history. He feels that there are great tasks to be accomplished, and a destiny to be fulfilled. He feels that his country is called to service and leadership among the nations. This world is not to be thought of as mere vanity; it is a field which offers to man at least within limits the possibility of creative action.

At the same time, independence has subjected the nation to great moral strains. It has called for a type of character, marked by great integrity and uprightness, such as is not to be found frequently in any nation, but of which India stands in special need just because of the immense task of national reconstruction that has been taken in hand.

Some Hindus are uncertain whether their inherited religion can give them either the philosophical basis for their new understanding of life and its responsibilities or the ethical vigor that service in such a world as this requires.

The Christian evangelist is convinced that the faith he proclaims has the perfect answer to the questioner in both these fields—of spiritual enlightenment and of moral power. Could any Christian wish for a more exciting task than that of making these truths live for the intelligent and sensitive heirs of the age-long traditions of Hinduism? Some observers feel that the evangelization of India, so far from having been accomplished, is now about to begin. The ablest Indian Christians are willing to accept the help of their brethren from the West, provided that they come in the spirit of humility and service. That, after all, is the spirit of the Christ.

Stephen Neill served as missionary in India from 1924–44, as Bishop of Tinnevelly from 1939–44, and is the Associate General Secretary of the World Council of Churches. He holds the M.A. from Cambridge, and the honorary D.D. from Toronto, and the Th.D. from Hamburg. He is author of several books, the most recent being A Genuinely Human Existence.

We Quote:

CONQUEST OF OUTER SPACE: “Doubtless the first reaction of man to this conquest of outer space is that we are on the escalator of scientific progress leading to utter destruction. The Christian man is smart enough to sense the necessity of adjusting these new scientifically demonstrated ideas as satellites around the Son of God. Then the dark room of outer space will become familiar to Christian faith. The general public, after a first reaction of fear, and then a swing to the opposite end of the pendulum and dependence upon scientific achievement, will ultimately turn to the revelation of God to help them understand and handle both the ideas and the problems of this ‘new’ universe.”—Dr. DUKE K. MCCALL, President, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, excerpts from a baccalaureate message to the first graduating class USAF Air Academy.

CHANGING DOCTRINE—“It is curious to note that so far as consistency is concerned, the simple-minded fundamentalists occupy much the stronger position. So much is this the case that the sophisticated modernist often resorts to dangerously obscuranist, anti-intellectualist arguments. In thinking of the church, not as a body committed to a certain belief, but rather as a body of friends that can share their beliefs at will, modernists fail to indicate how we can have any common program demanding our supreme loyalty, if there is no common body of belief as a basis of action or aspiration. Doubtless people may change their religious beliefs, and they are within their rights to form churches of their own. But they cannot, without loss of intellectual integrity, abandon the historic doctrines of their church and at the same time claim that their beliefs do not differ from those of the traditional founders.… An orthodox Christian might well pray for deliverance from friends who show so little respect for the dogmas which distinguish his from other religions.”

—MORRIS R. COHEN, American Thought: A Critical Sketch (pp. 191 f.).

In contrast to Hinduism, Confucianism, or Shintoism, Islam is a religion that firmly and passionately affirms the unity of the Godhead. It denounces idolatry in the most categorical terms, accepts superficially at least the biblical concept of prophethood as well as pays explicit homage to a number of Old Testament prophets, and it manifestly springs from the same milieu (geographically and conceptually) as Judaism and Christianity. But alongside these affirmations it maintains a series of unequivocal denials—denials implicit in Hinduism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and the rest, but explicit in Judaism and Islam alone. Islam categorically denies the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity and divine sonship of Christ, the fact and significance of his atoning death, the finality of the Christian revelation, and the reliability of the Christian Scriptures.

There have indeed been some who have characterized Islam as a Christian heresy. It is difficult, however, to dismiss a faith, claiming four hundred million adherents and a wealth of theological thought, as mere heresy; and while it is true that Christian heresies are almost always recognized by some compromise regarding either the person or atoning work of Christ, the denials of Islam are so radical that they constitute not so much deviation as defiance. Face to face with Islam one seems to hear the words of the beloved disciple: “He is antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22), for this is precisely what Islam does.

BARRIERS AND BRIDGES

In one sense, therefore, the Christian theologian is much more at home in Islam than he is in the great pre-Christian religions. He is in a realm that he can readily, if only superficially, understand, and where he and his Muslim friends will in part speak the same language. Yet he will find himself confronting an opposition which he scarcely experiences elsewhere. He will meet those who affirm their faith in the Old Testament prophets and even the Old Testament Scriptures as originally revealed, but who assert that these have been corrupted. They will be people who accept Jesus Christ as Messiah, as one of the greater prophets and as Virgin-born, but who put a categorical denial of Deity into His own mouth; who believe that the Jews meant indeed to crucify him, but assert that God miraculously intervened to save him from a felon’s death; who affirm the unity of the Godhead in a sense which precludes any differentiation of persons within that unity, and who emphasize divine omnipotence and transcendence in a way that involves a denial of God’s moral holiness or redeeming love. It is easy for the Christian to become so obsessed with these denials that he accepts them as barriers rather than attempts to turn them into bridges.

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD

The Christian Church herself must rightly assume much of the responsibility for the misunderstandings and misconceptions of Islam. There are few things finer than the denunciation of idolatry which Muhammad began. He was indeed so passionately convinced of the reality of the one true God that it seemed to him the worst of all possible sins to give His glory to another, or to worship anyone else besides him.

Say: God is One (unique), God is eternal.

He did not beget and He was not begotten.

He has no equal whatever.

In its original setting, this brief chapter from the Qur’ān did not constitute a denial of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity but of the crude polytheism of pre-Islamic Arabia. The tragedy is that later in Muhammad’s life, when he had heard a little more of Christian beliefs, he came to believe that Christians worshiped a Trinity consisting of God the Father, the virgin Mary, and their Son. Scarcely surprising is it that he denounced the whole doctrine as arrant blasphemy. It has been suggested that he may have got this idea from the Collyridians, a heretical sect which actually worshiped Mary; but more likely perhaps he merely misinterpreted the excessive veneration given by certain Christians to the one who has sometimes been called “the Mother of God.” As a result he depicted our Lord as complaining that His followers had made “me and my mother into gods beside God.” And although the better educated Muslim of today knows well that this is not the Trinity Christians worship, he still believes them guilty of the blasphemy of associating a creature with the Creator, or of making a mortal man into God; and he finds it desperately hard to understand that the truth is precisely the opposite—that we worship God who became Man.

There is much that is magnificent, however, in the Muslim doctrine of God. At its best there is an awful sense of his majesty, his omnipotence and his utter transcendence; and there is a corresponding sense of the littleness of man, and of the paramount duty of that submission to the divine sovereignty which constitutes the very essence of Islam (“surrender”). But the concept of his sovereignty and omnipotence has been allowed to overshadow his holiness and moral purity, and the concept of his transcendence and self-sufficiency has obscured his self-giving and his love. The Muslim God—in the dominant doctrine—need not act according to moral principles: he is sovereign, and who can call him to account? Also he cannot be made glad by men’s devotion, nor sad by their rebellion: he is utterly self-sufficient, so how can he be affected by his creatures? The revelation that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” whose omnipotence can never, of inward necessity, be inconsistent with his moral holiness, and that “God is love,” whose majesty has its fullest expression in self-giving and redeeming love, is veiled from Muslim eyes. It is not surprising, therefore, that to them the very idea that the Creator could take the form of a creature appears unthinkable, and the doctrine of the Atonement seems as morally unnecessary as it is spiritually blasphemous.

The question has often been asked whether Allah, whom Muslims worship, can be identified with the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” or whether we should proceed on the basis that he is quite a different god. To pose the question in this form, however, is to suggest the answer. There can be no doubt that Muslims worship Allah as the one Creator God; and the Christian is no less emphatic that there is only One who can so be described. But it is obvious that the one God is very differently conceived and described in the two religions. The Christian will recall the words of the apostle Paul: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”

GOD’S HOLINESS AND MAN’S SIN

It is the inadequacy of the Muslim conception of God’s holiness that undoubtedly provides the basic explanation for the inadequate Muslim view of human depravity. To associate anyone else with the Deity or deny his law are, to the Muslim, unforgivable sins beside which moral and social wrongdoing pale to comparative insignificance. Islam, indeed, has no doctrine of original sin, and regards man as weak and liable to err rather than fallen and inherently sinful. Man, therefore, is a sinner because he sins; he does not sin because he is a sinner.

THE NATURE OF CHRIST

The Christian is brought face to face with a similar misunderstanding with regard to the divine sonship of Christ. Here, indeed, he is met by a double misconception. Not only does the Muslim accuse him of putting a man on an equality with God, but the very title is conceived against a background of physical procreation and believed to refer to the Virgin Birth. It has been well remarked that what sometimes seems our Lord’s strange reluctance to make an unequivocal confession that he was the Christ—or before Pilate that he was the King—can be explained only on this basis: were he to have made this affirmation in those circumstances, and to those questioners, he would have invited almost as serious a misconception as a denial; for he was indeed Messiah, indeed King, but not the sort of Messiah the Jews were expecting nor the sort of King Pilate meant. The Christian feels much in this same position when an uninstructed Muslim asks him if Christ is the Son of God; for to say “Yes” without explanation would be almost as misleading as to say “No.” The basic problem is not so much one of confession as of interpretation.

Moreover, if it is impossible to decide where Muhammad derived his misunderstanding of the Trinity, it seems equally impracticable to determine how he came to his denial of Christ’s death upon the cross. “The Jews say ‘We have killed Jesus, Son of Mary,’ ” so affirms the Qur’an; “but they did not kill him, neither did they crucify him, but a likeness was made of him … and God raised him up to Himself.” This verse has always been interpreted by orthodox Muslims as denying for fact that the one who died on the cross was Christ. Instead, God raised Christ up to himself, they believe, and threw his likeness on someone else crucified there by mistake.

It may be, of course, that the genesis of this idea is to be found in Gnostic (or even Basilidian) theories which maintain that the aeon Christ descended upon the human Jesus only at his baptism and then left him before his passion. But the notion may also be a perpetuation of Peter’s reaction when he first heard that the Son of Man must suffer, for it expresses Muhammad’s passionate repudiation of the possibility that God could leave his faithful servant to such a fate. It was essential not only to Muhammad’s understanding of the position of a prophet but also—and more profoundly—to his conception of the character of God that the “apostle” should be vindicated and his persecutors outwitted. The traditions of Islam assert that before the last day the Christ who never died is to come again, marry and have children, break the symbol of the cross, acknowledge the truth of Islam, die, and be raised again at the last day.

MISTY VIEW OF SPIRIT

Again, it is the Muslim misconception of the Trinity that is at least partially responsible for the Holy Spirit being a nebulous figure in Islam and commonly identified with the archangel Gabriel, the angel of inspiration. The Qur’ān even asserts that Christ himself foretold the coming of Muhammad under the variant Ahmad. This may perhaps rest on a confusion between the Greek words parakletos (Paraclete) and periklutos, a possible translation of the name Ahmad.

THE ROLE OF SCRIPTURE

Finally, when we turn to the Scriptures, we see once more this strange combination of assertion and denial, acceptance and rejection. Early in his ministry Muhammad bade his followers consult the earlier Scriptures in support of his own teaching. He claimed that the stories told in these earlier Scriptures had been miraculously revealed to him. But at Medina he found that the Jews would not accept an Arab prophet, and they mocked the inaccuracies of some of his references to Old Testament persons and incidents. This was something he could not tolerate, so he accused them of twisting their tongues with the Scriptures. In its origin this phrase probably meant that they misread their Scriptures rather than mutilated the written text. Muslims commonly attribute not only the discrepancies between the Qur’ān and the Old Testament but the far more serious discrepancies between it and the New Testament in terms of deliberate falsification. Moreover, now that the final revelation has been vouchsafed through the “seal of the Prophets,” what need is there to concern oneself with things that have gone before? The tragedy is that Muhammad was never in a position to read the New Testament. Had he been familiar with it, the course of history might have been very different.

These are the beliefs of Islam regarding the Christian message. Faced with a challenge of this magnitude, the Christian can only travail to present his Saviour, by word and life, in a manner that will avoid any offence which is not the essential “offence of the Cross.” He can only pray for a divine work of grace whereby God himself will shine in Muslim hearts “to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

J. N. D. Anderson, O.B.E., M.A., LL.D., is Professor of Oriental Laws at the University of London. He has spent 14 years in the Middle East, is Chairman of the United Kingdom’s National Committee of Comparative Law, and is one of the world’s outstanding authorities on Islamic law and custom. An Anglican, he is Chairman of the Home Council of Middle East General Mission, and is also the Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of British Inter-Varsity Fellowship.

Judaism is the traditional religion of the Jews. Though a Jew remains a Jew, even if he denies every tenet of Judaism (most Jews would make an exception of the one who becomes a Christian), no one can become a Jew except by formally accepting Judaism. This fact supplies the background of the present controversy in Israel on who is a Jew. Thus Judaism and Jewish history are inextricably linked.

Judaism and Christianity are the only two developments of Old Testament religion that have survived the crushing of the Jewish state in A.D. 70 and 135. The destruction of the Temple eliminated the importance of the priests and discredited the apocalyptists like those of Qumran, while the bloody end of Bar Cochba’s revolt (A.D. 135) meant the end of the nationalists. By A.D. 200 the views of the Pharisees, generally known as Rabbinic Judaism, had become binding and normative for all those known as Jews.

DISPERSION AND CHANGE

The restriction of sacrifice to Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple in 586 B.C. and the growing dispersion of the Jews both East and West involved a fundamental change in religious outlook. Even when the Temple was rebuilt, the vast majority of Jews were unable to make effective use of it. Ezra seems to have represented the outlook of the best elements that remained in Babylonia, and his object was the making of the law of Moses as a whole rather than the Temple the center of religious life. The Temple was honored because the Law commanded it, but it was secondary for all that. This attitude was strengthened by the apostasy of many of the leading priests in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes and the scandals of the later Hashmonean high-priestly rule. While some, like the Qumran Covenanters, withdrew in despair from normal life to await an apocalyptic deliverance, the Pharisees set out to transform the nation.

Their main instrument was the synagogue which, by the middle of the first century B.C., was found in every Jewish community of any size. Here there grew up a nonsacrificial worship, and the reading and expounding of the Law became a center of its activity.

The underlying concept was simple; indeed Judaism is one more example of the danger of over-simplification in religion. The Torah (instruction is a better and fairer rendering than law) given through Moses was God’s supreme and final revelation; the prophets were merely commentators on it. When codified it was found to contain 613 commandments, 248 of them positive and 365 negative. The rabbis (Rabbi is a title of respect given to an expert in the Torah; he is neither a priest, nor a preacher, though in the modern synagogue he often performs the latter function) then surrounded these commandments with a “hedge,” that is, subsidiary commandments, the keeping of which would guarantee the keeping of the original commandment. For these enactments (“the oral law,” “the traditions of the elders”) they claimed as much authority as for the original written law.

LAW AND THE WHOLE LIFE

Though the destruction of the Temple was felt as a great blow, it is easy to see how this interpretation of the Old Testament, which had already so largely freed itself from the authority of the priests, was able to survive the disaster of A.D. 70. Under the leadership of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and his successors the oral law was developed by analogy to cover every circumstance of life, even when the written law did not deal with it. The concept was entirely reasonable, once one granted that the purpose of the Torah was to control the whole of life.

By A.D. 200 the rabbis had persuaded, crushed, or driven out all in Jewry who disagreed, and had formulated the oral law in the Mishnah. This with the much longer commentary on it, the Gemara, completed about A.D. 500, forms the Talmud which, for an orthodox Jew, shares in the authority of the Old Testament, for it is the authoritative expression of what the Torah demands. It goes without saying that the Talmud has had to be adapted to meet the changing circumstances of later centuries, but every ride which the Orthodox consider binding goes back in principle to the Talmud.

The work of the rabbis meant that Jewish life and Judaism became virtually synonymous. Medieval Christianity and Islam strove to reach the same goal, but were less successful. For this there were two reasons. The rabbis were acknowledged by Jew and Gentile alike as rulers of the Jewish communities (there was no effective secular leader to compete with them); and because of increasing weight of discrimination and persecution, a whole-hearted acceptance of his religion was the only motive for keeping a man a Jew.

THE VANISHING DEITY

There were two other influences at work in the formative years between A.D. 70 and 200. Though from the middle of the ninth century Greek philosophy brought a rationalistic strain into Judaism which it has never lost, at the earlier date all such speculation was deeply distrusted (the memory of Philo of Alexandria would have been lost, if his works had not been copied by Christian scribes); in addition there was every effort to make it impossible for a Jew to become a Christian. As a result there is very little real theology in Judaism, and the Torah was exalted until it occupied a place almost as high as Jesus Christ does in Christianity.

The Torah antedates the creation, Moses having been given merely a transcript of the heavenly original written in letters of fire. God chose Israel for his people in order that she might know and carry out the Torah. On the other hand, as a reaction against the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the gulf between God and man was increased, and the unity of God and his nature was affirmed in such extreme terms that especially after the entry of philosophical thought he became virtually the unknowable. Provided a man keeps the requirements of the Torah, it has always been assumed that his thoughts about it were correct. Indeed orthopraxy is a far more accurate term than orthodoxy to apply to Judaism.

WEAK SENSE OF SIN

The greatest weakness in Judaism is its diminution of the sense of sin. It has been a most effective barrier against gross sin, but it has seldom been able to help the one who has known himself the slave of sin. Its stress on the keeping of the Torah meant also stress on man’s ability to keep it, and this in turn meant a watering down of the absolute demands of the Law. The destruction of the Temple increased this tendency, for now there was no sacrifice to atone for shortcomings. Paul’s teaching that “through the law cometh the knowledge of sin,” and “that through the commandment sin might become exceeding sinful” has not only been incomprehensible to Judaism, but has made him the best hated of the New Testament characters.

Obviously in such a religion there has been much legalism, for the Jew has rejoiced that he has been given commandments to keep, and there has always been the temptation to see good in the mere keeping.

The rabbis have constantly stressed that the Torah should be kept out of devotion to its Giver. The Day of Atonement with its moving services have always kept the sense of sin awake. The sense of election, renewed annually for many in the Passover celebrations, has lifted the relationship to God above the level of arid legalism. Mysticism has repeatedly poured new life into Judaism, without making it pantheistic, to prevent legalism and rationalism from unduly separating God from human life. So in the history of Judaism there is a noble gallery of saints and martyrs.

Medieval pressure on the Jew reached its climax when the first voices of the Renaissance began to be heard. As a result the Jew was almost untouched by it and also by the Reformation. It was only shortly before the French Revolution that all the pulsing life of Europe began to affect the ghettos of the West. It took emigration to America or the first World War before East-European Jewry really faced the modern world; and it necessitated the setting up of Israel to bring it to the Jewish slums of Moslem lands.

NEW STATE OF ISRAEL

The effects on Judaism of this sudden and violent confrontation have been catastrophic. The present tensions in Israel with the religious parties are only one symptom of the impossibility for the orthodox Jew to come out into the modern world and yet bring the whole of his activity within the framework of the traditional Torah. The Jew who receives a secular education almost invariably loses any belief in the divine authority of the oral law and all too often in the divine inspiration of the written one. As a result the old monolithic Rabbinic Judaism has vanished.

We still find old-fashioned and sincere orthodox Judaism, but normally this is only in solidly Jewish districts where contacts, business and social, with non-Jews is kept to a minimum and where the children are given a traditional Jewish education with as few secular subjects as possible.

THE MOOD OF COMPROMISE

Very many religious Jews have adopted a position of compromise. As much of the law as is felt to be reasonable and practicable is maintained. The purely human origin of much of it is frankly acknowledged, but it is justified by its intrinsic value and its maintenance of Jewishness. In America such Jews are apt to call themselves conservative Jews; in Britain the majority of them still attend nominally orthodox synagogues, though the more extreme among them go to the Reform Synagogue, which must not be identified with the movement of the same name in America.

A small but growing minority in Britain and a much larger section in America have adopted the same position as the liberal or modernist in the church. They have moved the center of gravity from the Law to the Prophets, and the test of what should be kept from the past is whether it is found spiritually profitable. Their message is very near that of the Unitarians. In America they speak of reform Judaism, but in Britain it is more accurately designated liberal Judaism.

As Judaism began to break down, many Jews threw themselves into the promotion of modern knowledge and into every movement that has claimed to promote social righteousness. In other words they have sought spiritual satisfaction in serving their fellow men. That their efforts have at times been misplaced is obvious, but that is no justification for the antisemitic slander that Jew and Communist are synonymous. There were many Jews among the liberals who fought against the tyranny of the Czarist regime, and some were members of the Communist party. But, as the state of Israel has shown, there are few Jews who have not learned what communism really means.

With the slackening of religious uniformity, the nationalism which has never died out in Jewry began to awaken and to express itself along secular paths. Liberal dreams of ending antisemitism and traditional longings for the land of promise fused in 1897 to create the Zionist movement which, 50 years later, saw its dreams fulfilled in the setting up of the state of Israel, and yet now in the very hour of fulfillment knows that this alone cannot bring soul satisfaction.

Yochanan ben Zakkai and his friends did their best to shut Jesus and the Hebrew Christian out of the Synagogue, but the Church by its lack of understanding, unholiness of living, and persecutions even more effectively shut the Jew out of the Church. The century and a half of the gradual breakdown of monolithic Rabbinic Judaism has been matched by the growth of Jewish missions and increasing contacts with devoted Christians in daily life. As a result the figure of Jesus is no longer unfamiliar to a majority of Jews, and the New Testament has become a reasonably familiar book to many. The number of genuine converts is steadily increasing, but the typical Jew still thinks conversion incredible. Among the reasons for this are the prevalence of antisemitism and racial discrimination in the church, stress on theological theory rather than on holiness of life, and the many divisions of Protestantism which the Jew looks on as a negation of true religion.

H. L. Ellison is the son of a convert from Judaism, and served 29 years as a missionary to Jews until he became tutor of Old Testament at London Bible College, a post he filled from 1949–56. He was Vice-President of the International Hebrew Christian Alliance from 1947–50 and Chairman of the Jewish Committee of the British Conference of Missionary Societies from 1947–56. The Christian Approach to the Jew and From Tragedy to Triumph (Studies in Job) are among his books.

Christianity has always been a missionary religion. At the close of his earthly ministry, our Lord commissioned his followers to go and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19), and it is generally admitted today that the Church of later generations has no right to call herself apostolic unless she acknowledges this missionary obligation to be her own. Now, the universal missionary imperative implies an exclusive claim, a claim made by our Lord himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). To deny that men can know the Father apart from Christ is to affirm that non-Christian religion is powerless to bring them to God and effective only to keep them from him.

ONLY ONE SAVING RELIGION

Accordingly, the summons to put faith in Christ must involve a demand for the endorsement of this adverse verdict, and for the avowed renunciation of non-Christian faith as empty and, indeed, demonic falsehood. “Turn from these vanities to the living God” (Acts 14:15)—that was what the Gospel meant for those who worshiped the Greek pantheon at Lystra in Paul’s day, and that is what it means for the adherents of non-Christian religions now. The Gospel calls their worship idolatry (1 Thess. 1:9) and their deities demons (1 Cor. 10:20), and asks them to accept this evaluation as part of their repentance and faith.

And this point must be constantly and obtrusively made; for to play down the impotence of non-Christian religion would obscure the glory of Christ as the only Saviour of men. “There is none other name under heaven … whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). If Christless religion can save, the Incarnation and Atonement were superfluous. Only, therefore, as the Church insists that Christless religion, of whatever shape or form, is soteriologically bankrupt can it avoid seeming to countenance the suspicion that for some people, at any rate, our Lord’s death was really needless.

WHAT OF OTHER RELIGIONS?

It is beyond dispute that this is the biblical position, but naturally it raises questions. How does the Gospel evaluate the religions which it seeks to displace? How, in view of its condemnation of them, does it account for the moral and intellectual achievements of their piety and theology? And how does it propose to set about commending Christ to the sincere and convinced adherents of the religions it denounces, without giving an impression of ignorance, intolerance, patronage, or conceit?

These questions press more acutely today than at any time since the Reformation, and there are three reasons for this. In the first place, a century’s intensive study of comparative religion has made available more knowledge than the Church ever had before about the non-Christian faiths of the world, and in particular of the intellectual and mystical strength of the highest forms of Eastern religion. This makes it necessary at least to qualify the sweeping dismissal of these faiths as ugly superstitions which to earlier missionary thinkers, who knew only the seamy side of Eastern popular piety, seemed almost axiomatic. Fair dealing is a Christian duty, and everybody of opinion has a right to be assessed by its best representatives as well as its worst. (How would historic Christianity fare if measured solely by popular piety down the ages?)

In the second place, the great Asian faiths are reviving and gaining ground partly, no doubt, through the impetus given them by upsurging nationalism. It is no longer possible naively to assume, as our evangelical grandfathers often did, that these religions must soon wither and die as the Gospel advances. As we meet them today, they are not moribund, but confident, aggressive, and forward-looking, critical of Christian ideas and convinced of their own superiority. How are we to speak to their present condition?

In the third place, Christian evangelism has been accused, and to some extent convicted, by Eastern spokesmen in particular of having in the past formed part of a larger cultural, and sometimes imperialistic, program of “Westernization.” These thinkers now tend to dismiss Christianity as a distinctively Western faith and its exclusive claim as one more case of Western cultural arrogance, and to insist that the present aspirations of the East are compatible only with indigenous Eastern forms of religion. There seems no doubt that Protestant missionary policy during the last hundred years really has invited this tragic misunderstanding. Too often it did in fact proceed on the unquestioned assumption that to export the outward forms of Western civilization was part of the missionary’s task, and that indigenous churches should be given no more than colonial status in relation to the mother church from which the missionaries had come. It is not surprising that such a policy has been both misunderstood and resented. The Protestant missionary enterprise needs urgently to learn to explain itself to the new nations in a way that makes clear it is not part of a cunning plan for exporting the British or American way of life, but is something quite different. This necessitates a reappraisal on our part of non-Christian religions which will be, if not less critical in conclusions, more sympathetic, respectful, and theologically discriminating in method than was the case in earlier days. Christian missionary enterprise inevitably gives offense to those of other faiths simply by existing; but the Church must watch to see that the offense given is always that of the Cross and never of fancied cultural snobbery and imperialism of the missionaries.

It seems that the need for a deepening of accuracy and respect in the evangelistic dialogue with other religions is more pressing than evangelical Christians generally realize. This, perhaps, is because evangelical missionary effort during the past fifty years has been channelled largely through small inter-(or un-) denominational societies which have concentrated on pioneer and village work, whereas it is in the towns that resentment and suspicion of the missionary movement are strongest. But it is very desirable that evangelicals should appreciate the situation and labor to give the necessary lead. They are uniquely qualified to do this, having been preserved from the confusion about the relation of Christianity to other religions which has clouded the greater part of Protestant thinking since the heydey of liberalism fifty years ago. Though liberalism is now generally disavowed, its ideas still have influence; and its ideas on this particular subject are the reverse of helpful, as we shall now see.

LIBERAL BIAS LINGERS

The liberal philosophy (you could not call it a theology) of religion was built on two connected principles, both of which have a pedigree going back to the philosophical idealism of Hegel and the religious romanticism of Schleiermacher. The first principle was that the essence of religion is the same everywhere: that religion is a genus wherein each particular religion is a more or less highly developed species. This idea was usually linked with the reading of man’s religious history as a record of ascent from animistic magical rites through ritualistic polytheism to the heights of ethical monotheism—a specious speculative schematization, the evolutionary shape of which gave it a vogue much greater than the evidence for it warrants. (In fact, the evidence for primitive monotheism, and for cyclic degeneration as the real pattern of mankind’s religious history, seems a good deal stronger. Romans 1:18–32 cannot now be dismissed as scientifically groundless fantasy.)

The second principle, following from the first, was that creeds and dogmas are no more than the epiphenomena of moral and mystical experience, attempts to express religious intuitions verbally in order to induce similar experiences in others. Theological differences between religions, or within a single religion, therefore, can have no ultimate significance. All religion grows out of an intuition, more or less pure and deep, of the same infinite. All religions are climbing the same mountain to the seat of the same transcendent Being. The most that can be said of their differences is that they are going up by different routes, some of which appear less direct and may not reach quite to the top.

If these ideas are accepted, the only question that can be asked when two religions meet is: Which of these is the higher and more perfect specimen of its kind? And this question is to be answered by comparing, not their doctrines, but their piety and the characteristic religious experiences which their piety enshrines. For religions are not the sort of things that are true or false, nor are their doctrines more than their by-products. Nor, indeed, has any existing form of religion more than a relative validity; the best religion yet may still be superseded by a worthier. Accordingly, the only possible justification for Christian missions is that Christians, whose piety and ethics represent the highest in religion that has emerged to date, are bound by the rule of charity to share their possessions with men of other faiths, not in order to displace those faiths, but to enrich them and (doubtless) to be enriched by them. And from this pooling of religious experience a still higher form of religion may well be developed. This position was expounded at the academic level by Troeltsch and on the popular level in such a document as the American laymen’s inquiry, Rethinking Missions (1931), which Hendrik Kraemer has described as “devoid of real theological sense … a total distortion of the Christian message,” involving “a suicide of missions and an annulment of the Christian faith” (Religionand the Christian Faith, 1956, p. 224). (This is just what J. Gresham Machen said when the report came out, but with less acceptance than Kraemer’s words command today.)

A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

Since 1931, however, the theological atmosphere has changed for the better. The liberal philosophy of religions has been demolished by the broadsides of such writers as Barth, Brunner, and Kraemer himself, and attention is being given once again to the theology of religions found in the Bible.

What is this theology? It can be summed up in the following antithesis: Christianity is a religion of revelation received; all other faiths are religions of revelation denied. This we must briefly explain.

Christianity is a religion of revelation received. It is a religion of faith in a special revelation, given through specific historical events, of salvation for sinners. The object of Christian faith is the Creator’s disclosure of himself as triune Saviour of his guilty creatures through the mediation of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Word and Son. This is a disclosure authoritatively reported and interpreted in the God-inspired pages of Holy Scripture. Faith is trust in the Christ of history who is the Christ of the Bible. The revelation which the Gospel declares and faith receives is God’s gracious answer to the question of human sin. Its purpose is to restore guilty rebels to fellowship with their Maker. Faith in Christ is no less God’s gift than is the Christ of faith; the faith which receives Christ is created in fallen men by the sovereign work of the Spirit, restoring spiritual sight to their blind minds. Thus true Christian faith is an adoring acknowledgment of the omnipotent mercy of God both in providing a perfect Saviour for hopeless, helpless sinners and in drawing them to him.

Non-Christian religions, however, are religions of revelation denied. They are religions which spring from the suppression and distortion of a general revelation given through man’s knowledge of God’s world concerning the being and law of the Creator. The locus classicus on this is Romans 1:18–32; 2:12–15. Paul tells us that “the invisible things” of God—his diety and creative power—are not merely discernible but actually discerned (“God manifested” them; they “are clearly seen,” 1:19 f., ERV) by mankind; and this discernment brings knowledge of the obligation of worship and thanksgiving (vv. 20 f.), the duties of the moral law (2:14 f.), God’s wrath against ungodliness (1:18), and death as the penalty of sin (1:32). General revelation is adapted only to the needs of man in innocence and answers only the question: What does God require of his rational creatures? It speaks of wrath against sin but not of mercy for sinners. Hence it can bring nothing but disquiet to fallen man. But man prefers not to face it, labors to falsify it, and willfully perverts its truth into the lie of idolatry (1:25) by habitual lawlessness (1:18). Man is a worshiping being who has refused in his pride to worship his Maker; so he turns the light of divine revelation into the darkness of man-made religion, and enslaves himself to unworthy deities of his own devising, made in his own image or that of creatures inferior to himself (1:23). This is the biblical etiology of nonbiblical religion, from the crudest to the most refined.

FLASHES OF COMMON GRACE

Yet common grace prevents the truth from being utterly suppressed. Flashes of light break through which we should watch for and gratefully recognize (as did Paul at Athens when he quoted Aratus, Acts 17:28), and no part of general revelation is universally obscured. Despite all attempts to smother them, these truths keep seeping through the back of man’s mind, creating uneasiness and prompting fresh efforts to blanket the obtrusive light. Hence we may expect to find in all non-Christian religions certain characteristic recurring tensions, never really resolved. These are a restless sense of the hostility of the powers of the universe; an undefined feeling of guilt, and all sorts of merit-making techniques designed to get rid of it; a dread of death, and a consuming anxiety to feel that one has conquered it; forms of worship aimed at once to placate, bribe, and control the gods, and to make them keep their distance except when wanted; an alarming readiness to call moral evil good, and good evil, in the name of religion; an ambivalent attitude of mind which seems both to seek God and to seek to evade him in the same act.

Therefore, in our evangelistic dialogue with non-Christian religions, our task must be to present the biblical revelation of God in Christ not as supplementing them but as explaining their existence, exposing their errors, and judging their inadequacy. We shall measure them exclusively by what they say, or omit to say, about God and man’s relation to him. We shall labor to show the real problem of religion to which the Gospel gives the answer, namely, how a sinner may get right with his Maker. We shall diligently look for the hints and fragments of truth which these religions contain, and appeal to them (set in their proper theological perspective) as pointers to the true knowledge of God. And we shall do all this under a sense of compulsion (for Christ has sent us), in love (for non-Christians are our fellow-creatures, and without Christ they cannot be saved), and with all humility (for we are sinners ourselves, and there is nothing, no part of our message, not even our faith, which we have not received). So, with help from on high, we shall both honor God and bear testimony of him before men.

James I. Packer is Tutor at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, England. A scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he was graduated in classical studies, philosophy, and theology, and in 1954 received his D.Phil. degree. He was curate at St. John’s Church, Birmingham, before going to Tyndale as lecturer.

A man by the name of Martin Marty is a man I would enjoy knowing. I am perhaps conditioned by the overtones of his name—Marty Marion was my all-time favorite shortstop, and “Marty” is one of my all-time favorite movies. And now Martin Marty has clinched my prejudgments of him by writing a delightful book, The New Shape of American Religion.

We have a sufficiency of books on the organization man, exurbia, and the seeking of status, and with the exception of Babson and Zever’s Can These Bones Live? I can think of no other writer who has brought these questions of society over into the field of the church as clearly as Marty. He has the unquestioned ability to see our church in our times and to bring his critical mind to bear on the problems and dangers of the church with great clarity, pungency, and excellence. He abhors the church in the grey flannel suit.

There has been what Marty calls an “erosion,” as the things of this world blur the distinctions of Christianity, until no one knows where Christianity stops and modern society begins. This would be all to the good if our Christianity had so invaded society that the two had become one. But the opposite has taken place. One has the eerie feeling that society has changed Christianity into something that can be defined only as religion-in-general in which the object of worship is God-in-general. The question Marty raises is whether we have not created a new religion of God-in-general which dominates not only American society, but all the churches. Surprisingly enough, he finds this influence in Catholic and Jewish churches as well as in Protestant. “In God we trust,” but apparently this God in whom we trust has been created by and equated with the American way of life. Marty is especially sharp in seeing how church leaders and even revivalist religion are contributing to this blurred picture of God. Part of the plea of the book is for a new “particularity” to make sharp again what Christianity really is.

In facing problems and discovering solutions Marty follows a three-point outline—God, Man, Community. His chapter headings indicate the zest with which he handles such topics: “The God of Religion-in-general,” “Man in Religionized America,” and “The Setting for the Future: Panurbia.” With the author’s analysis of our situation one is largely forced to agree. He has his finger on the pulse of our times and has rightly diagnosed the fever of the church.

As is true of most critical analyses, it is easier to break an egg than it is to make one; the sections on analysis are sharper than those on synthesis. The three solutions offered for the error of our ways are these: (1) the revelation of God in the form of a servant, (2) the biblical view of man in community, and (3) the remnant motif as an impulse for the sake of the community. Marty is in good theological style. One can hear these solutions at any ecumenical gathering; mayhap Marty himself has been caught by the theological tides of our times. He knows very well that the only way we can revolutionize our times is by some kind of particularity, but particularities can be dashed awkward; revolutionists are often rude fellows. Nevertheless, the times do call for the divisiveness of truth. He is afraid that particular witnesses can “excite division and divisiveness,” and that prophets often have “presumption and dogmatic arrogance.” How true! “What went ye into the desert to see?” The first step in raising a new crop is plowing. Marty’s thesis does not quite make it in his last paragraphs. If we are to beware of blurred relativism, and at the same time beware of divisive individualism, I do not quite see how we can create in between “truth for us and our community presented as an option for the faith and hope of the world.” Truth “for us” is all the truth we know. How can we present it as an option? Luther could not, nor could Calvin, Knox, and the genteel professor, John Wesley. If we need a new culture we need first a new confession to which we can give absolute commitment.

Marty knows all this because in chapter one he lists four resources for what he calls “this hour of testing.” Look at three of them: (1) Protestants who do not fit in, (2) the recovery of biblical theology, and (3) the hidden church, which is described as “the people whom one meets in the more prosaic and more enduring life of the church.… In local congregations everywhere … a little flock which, no doubt, numbers many millions … nowhere else is a Christian witness more sorely tempted; nowhere else is it likely to survive.” These are the people I wager who never heard of the organization man, but hear the word from Billy Graham gladly!

The other resource Marty calls “The Ecumenical Movement.” And the way in which he treats this movement surprises one as it delights one. For, “the ecumenical gatherings … have brought Americans into close contact with men and women who are struggling and dying for the faith, with theologians who must draw their lines with clarity.…”

This kind of ecumenism suits me just fine. Marty’s solutions in chapter one are closer to the truth than his conditioned ones in chapter nine.

The University And Contemporary Thought

Religion and the State University, edited by Erich A. Walter (University of Michigan Press, 1958, $6.50) and Religion and Learning at Yale, by Ralph H. Gabriel (Yale University Press, 1958, $4), are reviewed by W. Stanford Reid, Professor of History, McGill University.

The university in Western society for the past millennium has probably been one of the best mirrors of thought to be found anywhere within the communities it has operated. What is more, it has helped from time to time to mold the thought of its day. Thus, if mid-twentieth century Christians in America wish to understand the origins and direction of contemporary thinking, they would do well to study the history and present state of the universities on this continent. And in their pursuit they will be greatly aided by two recent books: Religion and the State University, and Religion and Learning at Yale.

In the first book some 20 authors have endeavored to explain the present position of religion in the state universities and how religion might be fostered within their walls without contravening their basic principle of separation of Church and State. According to their basic constitutions as land grant colleges, most state universities are obliged to maintain a position of religious neutrality and give no support to any ecclesiastical organization or body of religious dogma. Yet at the same time it is becoming increasingly apparent that these institutions, even on social grounds, cannot ignore religion. Nor apparently do many teachers in them wish to be irreligious. This is the basic problem.

All the writers in this symposium are in favor of religion. To them it is “a good thing,” and some have very pertinent remarks to make on the subject. At the same time they are faced with the basic difficulty that religion is not something merely to be studied but to be believed. It is that which calls for self-committal. Therefore, they are forced to adopt the position that the university should foster ‘religiosity” without itself taking any stand. The state university’s religion is neutralism or agnosticism. Just as Gladstone tried this plan in Ireland in the nineteenth century without success, so it has been done in mid-twentieth century America to no satisfaction.

How America has gravitated to this position of religious neutralism in its state-supported universities, when in the beginning its schools were committed to Christianity, is made clear by the second book. Yale like all the early educational foundations had a strongly religious basis that was predominantly Calvinistic in the New England Puritan tradition. Moreover, this Christianity was obviously not something which formed a cloak for the school but was the warp and woof of its very existence. In fact Yale was a church as well as a college, and as such it represented the general outlook of New England society in that day.

The interesting thing about Gabriel’s book is that it shows very clearly how Yale gradually came to reject its fundamental Christian principles. Rationalism, romanticism, and Darwinism following at each other’s heels eventually destroyed any general belief in the reliability of the Bible as divine revelation. The result was that Yale has been left with a kind of general religiosity strongly resembling the points of view expressed in Religion and the State University. Secularism has taken over, leaving whatever religion is officially recognized as a formality. To the author of this book such an outcome seems to be acceptable, but it presents to Christians of more orthodox interests certain basic problems.

One thing both of these works seem to emphasize is that modern universities, or at least some of the teachers in them, are coming to realize that men cannot live by science alone. There are still the questions of right and wrong, the questions of death and ultimate survival which men must face. For this reason even the modern intellectuals are beginning to feel that perhaps religion is necessary—as a type of fire insurance. Thus religion is acknowledged to be of some importance, but it does not mean a revival of interest today in Christianity as such. This comes out very clearly in the latter part of Religion and the State University. Let no one say that the universities are becoming Christian because of an increased concern for religion.

As one looks at the religious history of Yale, he will also observe that no one ever made an effective attempt, in the days Christianity was emphasized, to set forth a Christian philosophy of life capable of dealing with new developments of thought. The philosophy and science of orthodoxy was, and to a considerable extent still is, Aristotelian, which was really incapable of dealing with the intellectual movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Christians, having no solid philosophy with which to approach new discoveries, found themselves forced either to surrender to the current rationalism and materialism or to withdraw from the intellectual field. This seems to be the reason why religion today in the universities is being studied primarily as an aspect of society, and also why it is regarded as something really extra-curricular to the university. It has remained separate from the academic intellectual endeavors of the scholar.

Largely because of this state of affairs Christianity, at one time dominating intellectual activities particularly in universities of the Western World, has gradually retreated from the arts and science pursuits of the university. The present situation also explains why many Christians today regard science, and in some cases education, as dangerous if not inevitably destructive of Christian faith. And this in turn indicates why Christian students attending the so-called “secular” or “neutral” university often regard their studies as of little importance except to obtain a degree wherewith they can get a job after graduation. It is not surprising, therefore, that with some exceptions the average Christian student at the neutral university is not among the intellectual leaders.

The attempted answer to this problem of irreligious education has been the founding of more evangelical colleges. (No one on this continent has yet succeeded in establishing an evangelical university.) But even these institutions, while they have been of some help to the Christian student, have generally been unable to provide a specifically Christian interpretation of reality except in theological terms. A certain amount of work has been done by individuals and groups to satisfy the need. Nothing really useful, however, has appeared. And owing to a lack of money, and to a primary emphasis upon evangelism or the sanctification of students by a myriad of regulations, few if any of these Christian colleges have demonstrated any effectiveness as research bodies.

Our present need is not more chapels and more religious centers in the universities. Christians who are in academic positions ought to be endeavoring with all their powers to produce a Christian interpretation of their own fields, and to demonstrate that it is the Christian faith alone that makes sense out of this universe in which we live. What is more, every effort should be made to encourage young people to enter the academic field and to teach in the neutral university. Since materialists, atheists, and the like set forth the facts of their fields according to their own philosophies, why should not the Christian do the same in order that men may have the opportunity to see what Christianity offers, and to reckon with it?

W. STANFORD REID

Indeterminancy

Chance and Providence, by William G. Pollard (Scribners, 1958, 190 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Lewis B. Smedes, Professor of Bible, Calvin College.

The terms chance and providence will strike most people as involving two contradictory notions. The providence of God means, for one thing, that all things are planned and controlled by God, which thus excludes the possibility of chance and accident in history. The thesis of this book, however, is that only a scientific description of the world in terms of chance is compatible with the Christian faith in providence.

The author, Dr. William G. Pollard, is a scientist of considerable rank as well as an Episcopalian priest. His book is an account of his search for unity between the two worlds of thought which he inhabits. As a scientist he is bound to the conviction that natural events are subject to scientific investigation and experimental verification. As a believer, he is equally convinced that God is at work providentially in every event. As he puts it, “I had come to know two realities, each all encompassing and of universal scope, which were so firmly rooted in my own experience that it was unthinkable to give up or deny either of them.” Rather than forcing him to give up either of his worlds, Dr. Pollard is convinced that modern physics has shown him how he can hold to both. Wholly apart from his conclusions, the author puts us in his debt for sharing his thought with us.

Dr. Pollard rests his case on the conviction that all scientific explanation is statistical in character. The structure of physical reality is such that for every event occurring in nature there are a varying number of corresponding possibilities that could have occurred. Scientific explanation is statistical, therefore, because it deals with the probability of certain events occurring out of any number of other possibilities. This is true of physics as well as of other sciences. All scientific explanation is statistical because the basic structure of the universe is such that all future events are indeterminate. The laws of nature do not determine one and only one possible effect in response to any given cause; the laws of nature only limit the number of relative probabilities. In other words, events that actually occur are not the only events that could have occurred. Chance, thus, becomes a basic ingredient of nature and history. Every instant, a great number of possibilities are opened up as a result of each causative factor. All this is a wide application of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminancy. It provides the key for Dr. Pollard in his attempt to harmonize his faith in providence with his commitment to the scientific method.

The world so structured as to be open each instant to many possibilities is the kind of world in which the biblical doctrine of providence has a real place. “Only in such a world could the course of events be continuously responsive to the will of its creator” (p. 73). Science reveals the world of nature to be the kind of place in which, at every point and at each instant, almost anything can occur. Providence, however, is not concerned only with the things that do. The actual events take place as they do because God willed them for his own purpose. The many possibilities that science understands to be present at each instant provide a field in which God is continuously at work bringing about those things that are. In other words, the world as now understood by modern physics is precisely the kind of world in which the providence of God can be a reality. The now outmoded mechanistic determinism had room for providence at most only as an occasional invasion of nature. The modern view of quantum mechanics and the principle of indeterminancy (or chance) leaves the whole field of nature and history wide open for the continuous operation of divine providence.

From a theological point of view there are several reasons for gratitude with Dr. Pollard’s book. We may be grateful, for example, for the author’s intent. He specifically is not trying to demonstrate from modern physics that providence is a reality. His faith in providence is a matter of belief in the biblical revelation. He is not writing an apologetic for providence; he is only trying to relate his faith in providence to his scientific convictions. We may also be grateful for his rejection of a providence understood as a supplementary explanation of history alongside of the scientific explanation. That is, he does not try to demonstrate that some things in history are accountable only by providence, though most things are explainable by science. Providence embraces all things, all events. The reality of providence is knowable only within a community of faith; it is never attainable through scientific observation. Though it is true on the other hand, that science can never disprove the reality of providence, this is not significant to Dr. Pollard’s argument. What is important to him is that a proper scientific view of nature opens up to him a world in which his faith in providence is not an anomaly.

This reviewer is not competent to make a judgment on Dr. Pollard’s thesis. It sounds both reasonable and exciting to him. But he is provoked to one question. Is it not dangerous to insist that one and only one view of nature allows for the possibility of providence? Dr. Pollard writes that “the one characteristic of the scientific description of the world which we require in order to have the kind of world in which the biblical view can be true is the description of phenomena in terms of chance and probability” (p. 97). I am wondering whether this strict exclusion of all other possible views of nature is not too binding for the doctrine of providence? Are we so sure that we have now reached the final state of scientific description? Is it impossible that a future era could “disprove” the indeterminacy principle? And, should a future science “disprove” chance in nature, think of the embarrassment of Christians who tied the possibility of providence to the reality of chance.

LEWIS B. SMEDES

“Whom God Hath Joined”

Christian Marriage, by Rolf L. Veenstra (Guardian Publishing Co., Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1957, 180 pp., $2.90), is reviewed by David W. Baker, Assistant Professor of Religion, Ursinus College, and Physician and Surgeon at Lankenau Hospital, Philadelphia.

In his preface the author admits that there is very little if anything in his book that is “more than a poor echo” of what has already been said “better and before.” And that is true. He might also have added that his book will have no appeal to those who are not Christians, and will offer little help to those who are. This is regrettable because the need for a good book on Christian marriage is great, and because much was expected from this particular book. It was selected as the first volume in a series of books designed to deal with some of the broad aspects of the Reformed faith and their practical application.

The author, the Reverend Rolf L. Veenstra, a minister of the Christian Reformed Church, has written loosely and inaccurately. This is quite surprising in view of the high standard of scholarship we have come to expect of the clergy of that denomination.

Mr. Veenstra devotes an entire chapter to the subject of marriage and sex. But after reading the nearly 6,000 words which he has written in this chapter, one comes to the conclusion that he has actually said nothing at all about the subject.

Other evidence of the looseness and inaccuracy of his writing is as follows: on page 146 he notes that physical adultery is “the one ground which Scripture permits as a reason for divorce.” But what of desertion? There is a solid body of scholarly opinion to the effect that desertion is also a scriptural ground for divorce. Though many disagree, including all Roman Catholic scholars, the constant Reformed tradition is that there are two scriptural grounds for divorce: adultery and desertion.

Mr. Veenstra also does not hesitate to go beyond the Scriptures. On page 146 he says: “A man who does not love his wife, or a wife her husband, is living in adultery, no matter how indifferent he or she may be to members of the opposite sex.”

A shocking case of authorial infidelity to Scripture is Mr. Veenstra’s comparison of marriage to the Trinity, found on page 18: “Through the ‘miracle’ of marriage two separate individuals become basically one, and these two, in turn, bring into being a third individual who is one with them, flesh of their flesh, and yet a separate person. Herein is a faint but real reflection of Him who is at once three, yet one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

For generations Jews and Moslems have been shouting at Christians that they worship three gods. And for as many years we Christians have been crying back: “Not so! Whatever be the relations between the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, they are not three gods, but One God.” We have been as insistent as Israel that “the Lord, our God, the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4). And the oneness of mind and will which characterizes the relation of the Son to the Father (John 5:19, 30), to give but one example, finds no likeness whatsoever in the relationships of marriage and parenthood. Anyone who has ever been a party to the full expression of personality in these relationships knows this full well! Spiritual, mental, and volitional unity between husbands and wives and their children simply does not exist in any manner which can be compared to that which the Holy Trinity has in these things. If the Trinity is like a man and his wife and their child, in even a physical sense, then we do worship three gods. But the facts are, they aren’t and we don’t.

We are inclined to the opinion that such statements as we have quoted are due to carelessness rather than conviction. For it is difficult to believe that any serious student of the Bible and the Reformed faith could be guilty of such obvious errors on any other basis.

There is also much carelessness in presenting non-scriptural matters. For example, in speaking of polygamy, Mr. Veenstra says: “There are more men in the United States who marry more than one wife than there are in countries which permit it” (page 143). This may be true, but Mr. Veenstra gives no evidence to support it.

“Lack of sexual adjustment,” he says on page 150, “is almost always a symptom rather than a cause of marital failure.” Again, there is no supporting evidence, and no recognition at all of a very large body of differing opinion that is supported by a considerable amount of therapeutic and psychological evidence.

His words in favor of celibacy are well taken. The world has been enriched by the sacrifice of marriage on the part of a few rare individuals. But Mr. Veenstra’s examples, taken as a group, are poorly chosen: Beethoven, Handel, Chopin, Brahms, Schubert, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Emily Dickenson, Charlotte Bronté, Florence Nightingale, and Jane Addams. Persons informed of the perversions and gross immoralities which stained the celibacy of some of these celebrated persons would better conclude than Mr. Veenstra: “It is better to marry than to bum” (1 Cor. 7:9). And in such a conclusion they would find ample support in the dean of the Reformed faith, John Calvin, as well as St. Paul.

Mr. Veenstra’s chapter on the Divine Organization of Marriage is altogether superior and excellent. It is the best we have seen anywhere. Here he gives evidence of being informed, scriptural, and wise, and he writes with great care and conviction. In this chapter he makes a valuable contribution toward the solution of some of the really basic problems of modern society. It is worth the whole price of this otherwise unfortunately written book. Would that Mr. Veenstra would take this chapter and expand it into a small volume! Such a book is greatly needed, and would be almost alone in its field. Perhaps the author and his publishers will favor us in the near future with a further effort directed along these lines.

DAVID W. BAKER

Kingdom In Parable

A Guide to the Parables of Jesus, by Hillyer H. Straton (Eerdmans, 1959, 198 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Frank A. Lawrence, Minister of the Graystone United Presbyterian Church, Indiana, Pa.

Why another book on the parables of Jesus? Because, answers the author, every man in every generation needs to feel the joy and glow of these matchless stories and to get into the heart of the mind and message of Jesus.

Dr. Straton, pastor of the First Baptist Church at Malden, Massachusetts, has been studying and preaching our Lord’s parables over a period of six years. Anyone reading this volume will agree that it bears the marks of careful study and deeply devoted scholarship.

The introductory chapter on “Parables and Their Meaning” is worth the price of the book. Here the pastor can take a refresher course in Parables and the layman will find a down-to-earth discussion of what a parable is plus a clear distinction between parable, fable, allegory, simile, and metaphor.

The author accepts and follows Julicher’s axiom that a true parable has but one point. He gathers our Lord’s parables under four headings, “The Kingdom is at Hand,” “Entrance into the Kingdom,” “Conduct in the Kingdom” and “Judgment in the Kingdom.” The book is rich in illustration, research, and application, and combines the historical with the fresh. This is another wave in the tidal bore which is surging back to biblical theology and biblical preaching.

FRANK A. LAWRENCE

Divine Revelation

The Study of Old Testament Theology Today, by Edward J. Young (Revell, 1959, 112 pp., $2), is reviewed by R. K. Harrison, Hellmuth Professor of Old Testament at Huron College, London, Ontario.

The four lectures which comprise this book were delivered when the new buildings of the London Bible College (England) were dedicated in May 1958. In approaching his subject, the author is not so much concerned with contemporary attempts to systematize the study of Old Testament theology as with those elements which any competent treatment of the subject must consider.

Dr. Young assesses the present interest in Old Testament theology in the light of his own conviction that the Old Testament is a record of the divine revelation to man in history. The nature of Old Testament theology is discussed with reference to recent archaeological findings, and its content is examined in terms of the Covenant and the Messianic prophecies. The final lecture demonstrates the manner in which the Old Testament undergirds the New with regard to the incarnate Christ.

Lucid and scholarly, this book covers admirably a neglected area of biblical study.

R. K. HARRISON