Page 6038 – Christianity Today (2024)

In 1900 there were approximately 250,000 college students in the United States. Today there are more than six million, an increase of 2,400 per cent. And this present student population is expected to increase by 50 per cent in the next ten years. What will these millions of students learn in their college years? In particular, what will they learn of Christian principles, absolute values, and biblical morality?

The first colleges in America were founded by Christians and had educational objectives in harmony with divine revelation. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, advised the class of 1814, “Christ is the only, the true, the living way of access to God. Give up yourselves therefore to him, with a cordial confidence, and the great work of life is done.” For the president of any great university to make such a statement today would probably be educational suicide. Now, with few exceptions, colleges and universities have abandoned the teaching of Christianity and the revealed moral standards of the Bible.

The move was not merely to a neutral position; often course material is decidedly hostile to the biblical faith. The March, 1967, issue of McCall’s magazine has an article entitled, “What College Catalogues Won’t Tell You,” based upon a questionnaire sent to a large number of student editors across the country. One question asked: “On which campus is a person most likely to lose his religious faith?” The answer: “Berkeley, the University of Chicago, any church-supported school.” Apparently, many of the church-supported schools are more theologically dangerous than the great universities, presumably because they require courses in Bible or religion that are taught from the liberal point of view.

The Center for the Study of Higher Education in Berkeley conducted a study of its Merit Scholars that included questions on their religious beliefs. Eighty-eight per cent of 395 men and 91 per cent of 175 women acknowledged that when they entered college they had felt a need for religious faith. By the end of the junior year the percentages had dropped to 51 and 69. In other words, 37 per cent of the men and 22 per cent of the women lost their sense of need for religious faith in three years. And there would certainly be further casualties in the year preceding graduation.

Noting these trends, Dr. Roy L. Aldrich, retiring president of the Detroit Bible College, said: “Modern educational philosophy has departed from the values of the Bible. No absolute values are any longer believed or taught by the educational establishment.”

What is a university? This definition of a university or college is given by the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies:

Places of higher education are, in the modern world (a world in which religion has lost its universal authority), the chief custodians and interpreters of value in society (Paper No. 1, 1965 report, p. 19).

The report goes on to say:

We think it improper to impose a rigid and preconceived moral system on students, but we insist that they discover and develop their own value system (ibid.).

According to these statements, the college should be an interpreter of value in society and yet teach that there are no fixed values or moral systems. This doubletalk bewilders the student.

Jacqueline Grennan, president of Webster College, which was formerly a Roman Catholic institution but is now independent, said in a panel discussion on modern education:

Only if we open up the system and let him [the student] see that there is no absolute morality, no absolute truth, but only an awful responsibility to try to find it—only then, I think, can we open up the dialogue and have the student share responsibility with us [“The New Education—Teaching Tomorrow Today,” The General Electric Forum, Fall, 1966].

No one contradicted or questioned Dr. Grennan at this conference of college presidents and government officials. Yet the statement was patently irresponsible. She was saying that although there is no absolute morality or truth, nevertheless students are responsible for finding it. This is like telling a child, “There is no Santa Claus, but you must find him.” No wonder students become rebels, beatniks, or drop-outs. And no wonder many commit suicide.

The Aspen report comments that “students are complaining that they do not find in their studies material that provides them with significant answers and a meaningful education” (p. 18). The National Student Association, at its 1965 conference, studied student stress. Its report shows the same discontent with educational experiences because the basic questions of life are not answered: “Who am I? Where am I? Where am I headed? Do I really want to go there?”

The loss of absolutes in education has lead to the so-called new morality and situation ethics. A leading advocate of the new morality, Dr. Joseph F. Fletcher, professor of social ethics at Cambridge Episcopal Theological School, would add a word to each of the Ten Commandments:

Thou shalt not kill, ordinarily.

Thou shalt not commit adultery, ordinarily.

Thou shalt not covet, ordinarily.

He said further: “Situation ethics has been criticized for leading to permissiveness in sex. And that is correct. It does.”

Dr. H. Philip Hook of Wheaton College made this significant statement in a recent article on the new morality: “This is the morality which has conquered the college world today; it is less than half a generation from becoming the standard ethics of our nation” (“Why Not?,” p. 2).

The teaching of morality used to be considered an essential part of education. So general was this assumption that the article on education in the Michigan constitution begins with these words: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” In the light of modern educational philosophy, this statement is obsolete. For most educators, religion has lost its authority and morals are relative.

Real Christian education furnishes a set of values that are not just well established—they are absolute. It answers with authority such basic questions as: “What am I? What am I here for? What is the highest purpose of life? Where am I going when this life is over?”

Some time ago Billy Graham spoke to University of California students in cooperation with the Campus Crusade evangelistic convention. The radicals in the audience interrupted parts of his message with boos and catcalls, but they quieted down when he spoke of their unresolved problems—death and eternity. He told about a college girl who was fatally injured in a car accident. Her last words to her mother were these: “Mother, you taught me everything I needed to know to get by in college. You taught me how to light my cigarette, how to hold my co*cktail glass, and how to have intercourse safely. But Mother, you never taught me how to die. You better teach me quickly, Mother, because I’m dying.”

Despite the babble of conflicting voices and increasing clamor of the apostles of the secular, it is still true that the great questions of life are answered in the Bible and specifically in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He is “the way, the truth, and the life.” Jesus Christ is the only person who fulfills completely our basic needs, because he is the only absolutely reliable person and he loves us with an everlasting love. As Augustine said: “Thou hast created us for thyself and our souls are restless until they rest in three.” Christ alone offers wholly adequate moorings for a man’s life. No person is properly educated for life who is not also educated for the life to come.

Lurking behind the problems attending the war in Viet Nam and the racial crisis is a serious situation in American life that promises to alter drastically the direction of the nation in future years. A deepening chasm exists between the present older and younger generations. Young Americans are protesting as never before.

Rebelliousness and impatience among youth is nothing new, of course; generation gaps have always existed in dynamic societies. Three hundred years before Christ, Aristotle in his Rhetoric described young men as “violent in their desires, prompt to execute their desires, incontinent, inconstant, easily forsaking what they desired before, … ready to execute their anger with their hands, full of hope … because they have by natural heat that disposition that other ages have by wine.” The young have always spearheaded movements that have had profound effects on society, be they the Christian Church or the Communist revolution. Certainly America would be a poorer country if her young did not exhibit the daring idealistic aspirations that provide the spark for progress.

But today the quantity and quality of young people’s rebellion against their forebears and against the society that has nurtured them causes many thoughtful people—young and old—to wonder whether the upcoming generation can sustain and advance a free, orderly, and stable society for the benefit of all its citizens.

The present under-thirty generation is significantly unlike previous generations that have carried on America’s ideas, traditions, and institutions. They constitute a larger group, both in number and in percentage of the population; in the United States the median age is now twenty-five. They are healthier and wealthier; only a limited minority has experienced the suffering of war or material deprivation. All have grown up in the tense cold-war period and have been bombarded by the appeals of an increasingly materialistic society. They are especially frustrated today both by the continuation of war, with its danger to human life and its threat to their personal plans, and by the failure of easy-to-come-by materialistic rewards to provide real satisfaction.

Exposed to more education than their forebears, today’s young people have imbibed a liberal philosophy that relativizes truth and enshrines doubt. In the education of most, empirical studies have eclipsed the humanities, the essential goodness of man and his ability eventually to resolve all problems have been promoted, premarital sexual experimentation has been winked at, and God and his Word have been omitted from serious consideration. Although their intellectual skills have been developed, as a whole their understanding of the spiritual dimensions of life remains undeveloped or warped.

Broken families, lack of unity and love in home life, and parents’ overconcern with economic considerations and underconcern for their total welfare also have taken their toll. Many young people have received too much too easily and are ungrateful; they fail to appreciate all that has gone into development of the high living standards and the free and stable economic system and democratic institutions that have helped make America the twentieth century’s promised land. Aroused by militant social critics, the young find it easy to express anger over our nation’s admitted shortcomings but have little to offer in the way of constructive solutions to vexing problems. With the desire to establish their individuality and to make their mark in the public arena, the “now generation” is emerging as the “protest generation.”

The activism of the protest generation has been encouraged by a multi-medium culture that has stretched their awareness of human happenings and urged them to become participants rather than spectators. Although rebellious protest is by no means the hallmark of all under-thirty people (many thousands are committed to responsible, reasoned means of improving society; many millions more are sheep who accept life in whatever shape it comes), the conspicuous spirit of the younger generation is one of resentment and alienation. Because many have accepted a value system that has abandoned all absolutes, made immediate practicability and pleasure the criteria for judging any idea or practice, and posited that laws are made to be broken, a communication breakdown has occurred between young and old. Parents do not understand why their children resent their advice and flout their authority. Communities are baffled by the determination of many youths to wear their hair long, dress outlandishly, expose themselves to the dangers of LSD, and relish obvious non-conformity. College administrators are perplexed by students’ readiness to stage sit-ins and go to jail to gain immediate redress for alleged grievances. Government officials are burdened by the strongly felt anti-war sentiment that causes many to defy the draft and last year led thousands of young activists irrationally to storm the Pentagon. The nation is outraged by the militant young civil-rights extremists—white and black—who advocate and use violence as the means of coping with racial problems.

Other generations have registered protest, but never on the scale or with the intensity that young Americans have displayed during the past decade. And the recent left-wing rioting in Berlin set off by the shooting of anti-American “Red Rudi” Dutschke, as well as frequent outbreaks of violence in London, Rome, Stockholm, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, shows that the protest generation is not found only in the United States. The mood of today’s youths throughout the world is estrangement from their forebears, ill will toward any and all societal “establishments,” rejection of all old solutions (despite time-tested evidence of their workability), and an overestimation of the efficacy of civil demonstrations and power-plays to bring about solutions to human problems. It is cause for great concern.

Yet despite their rebellion and limited wisdom, the protest generation also shows qualities that are important for all men. They detest sham in all forms (except maybe that “delectable con-man Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” as Malcolm Muggeridge has referred to him) and see the folly of allowing the quest of money and material assets to choke out the joy of living. They are willing to commit themselves to arduous tasks—as recently seen in the politicking of Eugene McCarthy’s student supporters in the New Hampshire primary—and are seeking causes that merit enthusiastic commitment. Although the younger generation’s patience with society may be short, their vision of the future limited, and their understanding of man naïve, their potential is probably greater than that of any other generation.

But if the angry mood and behavior of the young continues to increase during the next decades, the course of world history will surely become more chaotic and bloody. Strong-armed political czars will finally emerge to quell anarchy and restore order. The result will be the denial of that which young protestors most seek: freedom. Thus the full flowering of the liberal world view fostered by the youth will result in unbridled, sinful rebellion and a consequent totalitarian takeover in many societies.

If, however, the keen minds, strong hearts, and able bodies of the young are directed to the purposes for which man was created by God, the coming generation could be the best in man’s history. The utmost need of the hour is to confront the protest generation with the person and Gospel of Jesus Christ. Only by vital faith in the living Lord of redemption and history can youth find the wholeness, purpose, and power that will enable them to fulfill their possibilities. The Church must spare nothing to enlist its people and pledge its resources in an all-out effort to win the younger generation to Christ. So far its record in this is dismal. Part of the reason for current rebelliousness is that the Church as well as the home has not cared sufficiently for the young. Older Christians must listen and relate to youths in their communities in order to be able to communicate Christ’s love and truth to them. And younger Christians must realize that they, more than any others, bear the responsibility of bringing life-giving Christian truth to their non-believing fellows, for young people will most readily listen to their peers. All Christians must help the younger generation to see that only Jesus Christ can deliver the freedom, purpose, joy, and glorious future they are seeking. Believers in him are called to protest rightfully against unrighteousness and to participate creatively in God’s concern for needy people and in the building of his kingdom in the hearts of men.

Today’s younger generation stands before the world as potentially the best or the worst in the history of man. Many of its members are desperately seeking spiritual truth and reality. Senator Mark Hatfield recently said, “Some hippies seek deeper spiritual courses than people in the pew and have a deeper hunger for truth than some men in the pulpit.” The destiny of the world will be greatly affected by the way the Church responds in its witness to the protest generation. We must not fail them.

HIGH CALLING FOR CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

If Christianity is true, as all Christians insist, the task of the Christian college is self-evident. The Christian college, particularly the evangelical one, should strive to advance the truth in all its facets. To do this it must listen to all forms of human knowledge and relate biblical perspectives to them—to philosophy, history, the arts, science, and literature. Unfortunately, evangelical campuses sometimes settle for indoctrination and are content to immunize their students against “secular” modes of thought.

There was a time when criticism of the evangelical colleges came from the liberal camp. But no longer. Today it comes largely from within the Christian school—from students and from the more disaffected and courageous members of the faculty. Unbelievers, for their part, seem to write off the religiously oriented schools entirely and regard a Christian education as outmoded and irrelevant.

Dissatisfactions are often seething just below the surface on Christian campuses. Recently one faculty member of an evangelical school criticized many in his environment for “an almost complete lack of culture and poise.” Unfortunately, Christian teachers and administrators not infrequently lack good manners and social polish and act boorish, both singly and collectively. There is scant comfort in the fact that their counterparts can be found on the secular campuses.

More serious is the fact that the Christian school sometimes seems quite unaware of influential areas of thought in the world. Consequently, it lacks an adequate understanding of those who hold divergent views and is sometimes intolerant of them. This attitude is bad enough within the fundamentalist ghetto, for it produces Christians who are intellectually circ*mscribed, even ignorant. For the schools that train missionaries and pastors and send them to win the world, however, it is disastrous.

Many church-related schools have lost their doctrinal soundness; lacking this base, some have almost ceased to be Christian. This is unfortunate. On the other hand, doctrinal soundness alone cannot make a good teacher or scholar, much less a winsome apologist for Christian truth in an anti-Christian and secularly oriented world. The Christian scholar—both teacher and student—must be steeped in genuinely Christian perspectives and committed to the major tenets of biblical religion. But he must also be versed in non-Christian modes of thought and able to articulate a Christian position against this background. Moreover, he must grapple with the primary issues, not the secondary ones, and must seek to present the case for Christianity by the strength of analysis and logic rather than by rhetoric, polemics, and preaching.

Students and faculty who accept this task and work vigorously at it will go far to make the evangelical campus what it has every opportunity to be: an intellectual lighthouse in a darkening and disoriented world.

A TASK FOR NEGRO MILITANTS

With the pall of smoke from gutted, riot-torn city blocks barely gone from over the Capitol, Washington awaits the militant invasion of civil-rights protestors determined to press demands for greater expenditures and programs from Congress. The violent street scenes of the past month have done little to cool the ardor of civil-rights leaders for achieving objectives by militant demonstrations. Although they avow non-violence, most Negro spokesmen have not renounced the riots as deplorable and detrimental to true racial progress. Rather, many view them as the expected and understandable response to unfortunate social conditions. They now plan even broader public exhibitions—marches and a massive tent-in—to further dramatize their demands.

Whether civil-rights leaders intend it or not, the Washington demonstration is likely to heat up tempers among volatile Negroes and whites more than enlighten the hearts and minds of those who can improve the condition of Negroes in society. Rather than induce reflective thought and responsible action, the militant crusade will tend to deepen disharmony and possibly to precipitate violence. Thus we and many others who champion elevation of the status of Negroes in society through more jobs, better education, equality in public accommodations, and, most of all, greater personal respect, are apprehensive about the plans for Washington. If civil-rights leaders want to make a constructive impression, they would do well not to stage a useless tent-in but to organize a program for economically deprived Negroes to work together to remove the rubble and rebuild many facilities destroyed by rioters in past weeks. This would show Congress and the American people their determination to apply themselves to the task of social reconstruction. Angry utterances and mass demonstrations will do less to help the ordinary Negro gain greater recognition and opportunity than will steady, conscientious persuasion in our public forums backed up by responsible and continuing enterprise in making America a better place in which to live.

A few months ago a boy examining the stones in an abandoned mine found a ruby worth about $7,000. This gem had been overlooked by thousands who had searched there for something of value.

Man, engaged in his unending “search for truth,” continually passes by truth and picks up baubles instead.

Truth has to do with ultimate questions and answers, rather than merely with knowledge and information. Advances in knowledge stagger the imagination. It is estimated that man is prepared to make use of only 10 per cent of the information available to him. Truth has to do with the nature of man—who he is, why he exists, what his destiny is. Truth has to do with God, with good and evil, with sin and redemption, with time and eternity.

And all the while, as men blindly search, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, stands ready to reveal himself as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” only to be rejected in favor of substitutes that at best leave emptiness in the soul.

Perhaps some of us have been fighting the battle for truth on the wrong front. We are concerned because of the world’s confusion, reflected in every area of life and highlighted by the revolt of young people. Because of our assurance that Christ is the answer for all these problems, we are inclined to wage the battle at the level of doctrines that have to do with his person and work, and with the record of these truths in the inspired and authoritative Scriptures.

But while our own faith and hope rest squarely on Christ, as revealed in the Scriptures, we find that the questions many are asking today delve behind the revelation of God in Jesus Christ to the very existence of God himself.

We are confronted with a generation characterized by ignorance of the Scriptures and the Christ they reveal. It is a generation largely devoid of Bible-based moral and spiritual values, one that has been brought up on a syncretistic philosophical conglomeration where “religion” is, at best, a questionable option.

This spiritually starved generation is to be pitied, because we, of a former generation, have so poorly taught and lived the faith we have professed. In a sense they are like children who are being taught calculus and trigonometry without knowing the multiplication table.

How can Christians help others to find truth? Pious phrases, platitudes, and clichés are meaningless. In these times of spiritual ignorance it is the Spirit who teaches through the Word of God, which is still the Sword of the Spirit, and through lives filled with his presence.

Deep down in the human heart—yes, even in the hearts of a cynical and disillusioned generation—there is a longing for God that can never be satisfied until he is found in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Although men do not “reason” themselves to God and at some time must take the unreasonable step of faith, still we know that God has not left himself without a witness in this world.

As I write I can look out and see all around evidences of his hand in creation. I see the sky with clouds scudding across the blue of infinite space; I see trees and flowers and grass; and I, as one who is aware of and believes in the divine revelation, remember that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” I sense the wonder in the words: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.” And I go further, for I know that it was through Jesus Christ that all this was brought into existence: “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

For anyone to think that things just “happen,” or that natural objects have within themselves the forces that explain the marvelously intricate operations of the universe, he must exercise a credulity far more difficult than faith.

A scientist searches for facts wherever they may be. He projects hypotheses into the unknown, experiments, gains evidence from multiplied sources or even by accident. But along the way are the evidences of God’s handiwork, whether he recognizes them or not. There can be no real and lasting conflict between the facts of science and those of revealed Christianity.

The philosopher, too, if objective in his search, will find in the books of Job and Romans (to mention but two places in the Bible) a depth of philosophical truth that, when illuminated by the Holy Spirit, will transcend anything to be found in the writings of the greatest secular thinkers.

No matter how earnestly a man may search, he is rewarded only when he is willing to accept truth as truth. Honest search will find honest answers, and honesty demands humility, a humility that discards presuppositions in favor of facts.

The greatest single deterrent to man’s discovery of truth is the tendency to give precedence to presuppositions that rule out the supernatural and the miraculous. Many “thinkers” today have stumbled over their own doubts to the place where they are blind to God’s truth.

Looking for truth, one can look at the universe and be convinced that some rational, powerful, wise, and good Being must have brought it into existence. Logic demands that we reject the idea that it is “self-contained,” “self-con-trolled,” or “self-developing.” The order and wisdom to be found in the universe demands that we accept the fact of a Creator-God.

Let the honest searcher for truth continue his search and he comes face to face with Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The Apostle Paul urges: “See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:8,9).

Searching for truth is not enough. One must recognize it when it is found.

And there is a tragic alternative. One may reject the truth in favor of a lie. Satan is the master counterfeiter, and nowhere is he more active than in the minds of men.

The Apostle Paul describes the evidences God has given of himself in his creation (Rom. 1:19, 20) and then goes on to describe the folly of those who willfully reject this evidence: “Claiming to be wise, they become fools” (v. 22).

And what of the final state of those who reject God’s truth? “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!” (vv. 24, 25).

In man’s search for truth, his greatest folly is to reject or discard Jesus Christ, the Creator and Redeemer, the Pioneer and Perfecter of faith, the One who is Truth itself.

Dear Hippie-Watchers:

The ubiquitous presence and lively activities of the hippies indicate that they have no intention of folding up their pads, cutting their hair, and quietly stealing back into “middle-class respectability.” Many drop-out hippies have dropped back into the social brouhaha now as militant yippies. (“A yippie,” said one, “is what happens to a hippie when a cop hits him over the head.”) And they’re out to change the world by involvement in man’s three major causes: sex, politics, and religion.

Their revolt against sexual mores may be observed in the Sexual Freedom League’s libidinous parties, the recent spring “nude-in” by a flock of fifty nudeniks in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the abundance of sex come-on ads in “underground” newspapers, and, lest we forget, the one-man crusade of “Naked Adam” Feldman. Adam apparently views disrobing in public for the cause of freedom as his life mission. After an appearance at the recent “neo-naked nude-in” protest at the Oakland Induction Center (“Nudity, not napalm”; “Go naked, not army”), he strolled among the cars in a freeway traffic jam, smiling and waving in his birthday suit. It was his free way of showing what it means to be truly human!

The yippies’ political activism is set to explode at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Chicago. They hope to involve 200,000 young pilgrims in their “guerrilla theater” antics. They proclaim: “Come to Chicago to do your thing; be the Festival of Light confronting the Convention of Death; and spread the word.” Since President Johnson has bowed out of the race, we can’t be sure which candidate will experience the wrath of the yippies’ “politics of ecstasy.”

In the religious realm, they’re trying to revive the psychedelic Neo-American Church. “Rev.” Jefferson F. Poland, ex-leader of the Sexual Freedom League, has been appointed “Primate of California” by Chief Boo Hoo Arthur Kleps of New York. He now seeks a storefront in San Francisco for public evangelism. A year’s free growth of hair entitles Boo Hoos to absolution for “five sins of self-pity or one sin of lack of compassion.” They have special meetings when the moon is full.

Call them hippies, yippies, or Boo Hoos, they’ll be around to bug the straights, fuzz, and narks for some time to come. Maybe we all should become longhairs and freak out.

EUTYCHUS III

Feelin’ groovy,

AND EVANGELICALS WHISPERED

During the crucial hours and days following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., people in grief and despair, uncertainty and dread grappled with the issues of life.… Because the consequences of the catastrophe were national, the need really was for an evangelical voice to be heard nationally.…

Dr. Joel Nederhood of … the Christian Reformed Church on very short notice prepared a special broadcast of the “Back to God Hour,” from which NBC Radio News excerpted a segment for its Sunday afternoon memorial tribute to Dr. King (“How the Church Reacted,” News, April 26).…

One voice, eloquently and effectively raised to the nation in the time of desperate need—but only one! Why no others? Was this the way evangelicals demonstrated that they had well earned and truly deserved their reputation for lack of social awareness, compassion and concern, for irrelevance, for “playing church”?…

The crisis of a century; the nation listened; but from those who had the only adequate answer, there was but a whisper.

DANIEL G. ZIEGLER

Bible Fellowship Church

Staten Island, N. Y.

I am a Christian; I am also black, and being black causes me to take a different view of things than do most evangelical Christians who happen to be white and middle class. For two decades I have had the opportunity to observe evangelical Christianity (American version) at rather close quarters.… and [I] feel I know evangelicals quite well. They have many virtues and many faults. I trust you will forgive me if, on this occasion, I do not mention their virtues, but take a rather hard look at some of their faults.…

The Lord said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (the second greatest commandment). If this means anything at all, it means that I want my neighbor to be treated the same way I myself would want to be treated in any given circ*mstance. It means for the Christian that he be absolutely color blind, absolutely without racial or religious favoritism in dealing with his fellow man.… It is hard for Negro Christians to believe that most white conservative Christians have even begun to fulfill this commandment.…

I realize, though, that most evangelicals do not hate Negroes—they simply do not love them.

Racism, however subtle, on the part of evangelicals is especially burdensome to those of us who are black evangelicals and who sometimes find ourselves in the embarrassing position of having to explain to our black brothers how we can believe the same Gospel as “those conservatives who care nothing for us.”

It is sad that those who pride themselves in biblical orthodoxy can evidence so little Christian love.… While conservative Christians busy themselves with their little dos and don’ts, the greater moral issues of love, justice, and mercy are being wrestled with and acted upon principally by those outside the evangelical community. If evangelical Christians do not awaken to what is happening in the world of the 1960s and begin to show a little Christian love and concern, they may find that in the world of the 1970s no one will be interested in hearing their message.

JOSEPH L. FIELDS

New York, N.Y.

EASTER EXCITEMENT

I found the dialogue on the resurrection (April 12) very exciting and feel more forums of this type are well in order. It was very encouraging to see a top respected theologian of the stature of Pannenberg, trained in a Bultmannian atmosphere, declare the importance of the resurrection. Conservative theology is something to be reasoned with and can no longer be dismissed with the non-thinking wish-theology or liberalism which characterized much of twentieth-century theology.

DANIEL JUSTER

Wheaton, Ill.

FACING THE LOSS

The editorial “The Loss of Personal Religion” (March 29) raises questions that far too many Methodist ministers and laymen are just frankly afraid to face. The spirit and accuracy of the editorial are alike unassailable. As a concerned Methodist evangelical, I commend the editorial.

HARRIS C. JONES

Mount Vernon Methodist Church

Mount Vernon, Ala.

It would be impossible for me to disagree more with “The Loss of Personal Religion.”

Suffice it to say that, whereas your criticism of the new Methodist literature … is that such materials reflect “the loss of personal religion,” it has been my experience to note that these materials are both applauded and denounced for one reason, namely: because they jerk religion out of the abstract and plant it squarely in the midst of our personal worlds, where we live and move and make our living.…

RICHARD H. PETERSEN

Chaplain

Pfeiffer College

Misenheimer, N. C.

Your title for an article dealing with the particular unit in question would be titled more accurately “The Loss of Traditional Language in Religion.” As I see it, this unit uses the language and experiences of the modern world to make men aware of the emptiness of life apart from God.

CLAUDE JOHNSON

St. Andrew’s Methodist Church

Amory, Miss.

JAZZ REVIEW

I was very interested in the report (March 29) about Dave Brubeck.…

You would be interested to know that the Mennonite Brethren Church is compiling a new hymnal and … planning to include folk hymns with guitar notation. We sincerely believe that the hymnal of the 1970’s must include this type of hymn. I don’t know of any other denominational hymnal which does.

This letter is written because of a deep concern for the spreading of the Gospel and the giving of a true witness of Jesus Christ to a lost world through the medium of music. The Christian college must take leadership in training young people for Christian service as well as help them in defining their own Christian faith. In music we now have a job of evaluating the use of jazz as a useful technique. My sensitivity to this area of concern is being sharpened because most of our young people are conversant with jazz without the prejudice that most of us have had against it.

PAUL W. WOHLGEMUTH

Chairman, Dept. of Music

Tabor College

Hillsboro, Kan.

Your article on Dave Brubeck’s oratorio on Jesus was fascinating. I would like my teen-age children (and myself) to hear this hour-long concert.

RUSH W. DOZIER

Madisonville, Ky.

CONSIDERING CREPE

I want to express special appreciation for the editorial, “Crepe-Hangers in the Church” (March 29).

I wonder if the primary reason students shy away from the parish ministry, ministers leave it and lambast it, is that they do not understand the real nature of the ministry.…

The ministry is less wielding political power or pressure on public officials than a person-to-person encounter.… Instead of healing the demoniac, our Lord might have lobbied for better mental-health care before the Roman government. Instead of saving the soul of Mary Magdalene, he might have pressured the police to raid the brothels.… Since Scripture says that our Lord had nowhere to lay his head, he definitely should have worked to improve the housing situation.

DONALD B. TAYLOR

Bethany Christian Church

Evansville, Ind.

The crepe-hanging editorial made its point. Now, let me make mine.…

At the age of sixteen, I was converted in and became a member of a Baptist church. I was immediately taught to believe that Baptist church structure was patterned after the New Testament example of a Christian church. [Since then] … I noticed certain things about New Testament churches which are not being taught in Baptist churches.…

I am still a Baptist, but I no longer believe everything I hear in Baptist churches; sometimes, I believe things which I do not hear.…

You see, Timothy was also specifically warned about false teaching and was told that correction (at the obvious cost of being called a crepe-hanger) would result in salvation (1 Tim. 4:1–16).

F. E. GARMAN

Hammond, Ind.

WORD FROM DOWN UNDER

Craig Skinner has reported in your journal that a congregation has separated from the Presbyterian Church of Australia (News, March 1). As the minister of this congregation may I correct the description of myself as a “hyper-Calvinist”?…

We are aware, as Dr. Skinner states, that the more “moderate” evangelicals consider these moves “immature.” The commendable maturity of the moderate evangelical is in no way doubted, and has been nowhere better demonstrated than in New Zealand. It was this magnificent maturity which kept evangelical ministers paralysed with fear while the immature elder Robert Wardlaw carried on the fight against Geering, single-handed, and then immaturely separated, while the clergy so maturely stayed in a church twice apostate, plucked up by the roots, foaming out its shame with wretched double-talk in two consecutive assemblies.

A. GRAHAME KERR

Presbyterian Reformed Church

Cronulla, N.S.W., Australia

As founder of the New Zealand Presbyterian Laymen’s Association … and as national chairman of that association until after the visit to this country of the Australian pastor you described in your columns as a “hyper-Calvinist,” I want to assure you that the association was not, in fact, connected … with the sponsoring of this visit. Further, while the independent group in separation here does not seek to criticise by repudiation, it has no relationship … with the ICCC or any other [such] group.

Your correspondent’s statement … infers [unfairly] an extremist attitude and immaturity of outlook. Some of the mud slung in ill-informed inferences such as this can stick and do untold damage to a truly faithful and thoroughly moderate witness such as we believe ours to be.

R. J. WARDLAW

Auckland, New Zealand

STRONGER THAN U.S.

I have considered your comments on the South West African terrorist trial (News, March 1) and feel challenged to express the view that it was very unfortunate that you mentioned: “That the case was a travesty of justice seemed quite clear”.…

These terrorists were inspired and trained by Communists with the sole purpose of inciting hatred and violence and … murder. South Africa seems to be a stronger bastion against Communism than is America.

G. O. RUTTER

Cape Town, South Africa

Second in a series

At the time of the Great Commission as Matthew records it (28:16–20), more than a week—we do not know just how much time—had passed since the first Easter Day. The disciples of Jesus had returned north to Galilee, and there on a mountain, by appointment, Jesus met them again. This was probably the occasion Paul meant when he said that Jesus appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time (1 Cor. 15:6).

When they saw him (evidently from a distance, at first), their reactions ranged from adoration to unbelief. Some “worshiped him” (NEB, “they fell prostrate before him”), but “some doubted.” Jesus then came and spoke to them. He made an announcement (Matt. 28:18), issued a command (19, 20a), and then gave them a promise (20b).

1. The announcement he made: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (v. 19, RSV).

That this affirmation preceded the commission to go forth to the nations is of vital importance. Indeed, without this announcement of his authority, the Great Commission would have lacked justification as well as impetus. Not until one is convinced of the full authority of Jesus Christ is he in a position to hear and to obey Christ’s commission to go.

a. What was this authority he claimed? “All authority in heaven and on earth.” Here Christ used different prepositions, as if to distinguish the two spheres over which his authority extended—the earthly and the heavenly.

Take earth first. Since he has all authority on earth, he has authority over his servants; this is doubtless a part of his meaning. He is like a commanding officer, who can deploy his forces as he chooses and send them wherever he likes. He has authority to say to anyone, “Go!” He has said it to the Church, but as a whole, the Church has dared to disobey its sovereign Lord.

Since his authority takes in all the earth, it extends beyond those whom he sends to all the nations to which they are sent. Although Satan, the “prince of this world,” had usurped this authority, it now has been given to Christ.

This fact asserts unequivocally that the religion of Jesus was not Palestinian or Jewish, Semitic or Asiatic, let alone “Western,” but a world religion—indeed the world religion, intended to embrace all the nations then in existence and those that might yet be. It was to transcend all barriers of language and culture, nationality and color, race and rank.

But Christ declared that he had been given all authority in heaven as well. No doubt this means, in part, that the authority he claimed on earth was recognized in heaven, and that the disciples won on earth would be acknowledged and accepted in heaven.

But it involves more than that. It signifies that Jesus Christ has supreme authority in those “heavenly places” (as Paul called them in his Ephesian letter) in which evil “principalities and powers” still operate and wage war (cf. Eph. 6:12). Having raised Jesus Christ from the dead, God has “made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet …” (Eph. 1:20–22). The authority of Jesus Christ extends over all creatures, whether human or superhuman; over the Church; over the nations; over the devil and all his works.

b. When was this authority given to Christ? He claimed it on that Galilean mountain as an accomplished fact (aorist edothē, “was given”). Probably it was given to him by the Father by virtue of the Cross and in anticipation of the Ascension. Certainly this statement is confirmed by the rest of the New Testament. It was at the Cross that he “disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it” (Col. 2:15 m., RSV). It was by his blood that he ransomed men for God from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (Rev. 5:9). And it was at his Ascension that God “highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9–11).

The fundamental basis of all Christian missionary enterprise is the universal authority of Jesus Christ, “in heaven and on earth.” If the authority of Jesus were circ*mscribed on earth, if he were but one of many religious teachers, one of many Jewish prophets, one of many divine incarnations, Christians would have no mandate to present him to the nations as the Lord and Saviour of the world. If the authority of Jesus were limited in heaven, if he had not decisively overthrown the principalities and powers, believers might still proclaim him to the nations but they would never be able to “turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God” (Acts 26:18).

Only because all authority on earth belongs to Christ dare the Church go to all nations. And only because all authority in heaven as well is his has it any hope of success. It must have seemed ridiculous to send that tiny nucleus of Palestinian peasants to win the world for Christ. For Christ’s Church today, so hopelessly outnumbered by hundreds of millions who neither know nor acknowledge him, the task is equally gigantic. It is the unique universal authority of Jesus Christ that gives Christians both the right and the confidence to seek to make disciples of all the nations.

2. The command he issued: “Go ye therefore” (v. 19).

This imperative, “Go ye,” immediately followed the indicative statement, “All authority has been given to me”; the announcement of Christ’s universal authority was an essential preliminary to the Great Commission.

Believers “go” because they are themselves under authority. They go to “all the nations” because the nations are under authority also. The commission is no longer to seek “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:6); it is to make disciples of “all the Gentiles” (that is what the word “nations” means). So ends the most Jewish, the most particularistic, of the four Gospels. The Gospel of Matthew begins with the coming of Gentile strangers to worship the infant Christ; it concludes with the sending out of believers to win the Gentile world.

As they go, they have precise instructions to fulfill. Christ used three verbs: “make disciples,” “baptize,” and “teach.” Some scholars interpret this as a single command to “go and make disciples”; “baptizing them” and “teaching them” they consider the explanation of how disciples are made. I prefer to take the three verbs separately as descriptions of three distinct parts or stages of the one Great Commission of Christ to “go.”

a. “Make disciples of all nations.” The New English Bible rightly renders this, “Make all nations my disciples.” The addition of the possessive “my” brings out the sense. One cannot “make disciples” in the abstract, for there can be no disciples without a teacher.

How to do this is made plain in the other versions of the Great Commission. It is done by preaching the Gospel. For preaching the Gospel means preaching Christ so that men are converted to him and become his disciples. There is no getting away from this elementary truth: evangelism is preaching Jesus Christ and making disciples of Jesus Christ. The central objective of all Christian evangelism is to secure the allegiance of men and women, not to a church, nor to a system of thought or behavior, but to the person of Jesus Christ. Discipleship comes first; the church membership, the theology, the ethical conduct follow.

In summoning people to discipleship, we will do well not to forget the solemn conditions laid down by Christ the Master. Unless one “hates” his family, takes up his cross, and renounces all that he has (putting Christ, that is, before his relatives, ambitions, and possessions), one cannot be his disciple, he said.

b. “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The theological implications of this are far-reaching. It means that discipleship to Jesus Christ involves ipso facto relationship to the Father and to the Holy Spirit as well; it means, too, that although the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are distinct persons, they possess but one Name into which disciples are baptized.

The Greek word translated “in” here might better be translated “into.” Christian baptism is not just in the Name but into the Name of the Trinity; it signifies union with God, the God who has revealed himself by this threefold “Name” as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Further, whatever the precise significance of baptism may be (and convictions on this vary), baptism is essentially a public act. People may become the disciples of Jesus secretly, but they must be baptized publicly. At the very least, baptism is the public confession and public acknowledgment of those who claim to be Christ’s disciples, and it thus admits them into the visible church.

So, in advancing from discipleship to baptism, Jesus moves from the private to the public, from the personal to the corporate, from conversion to church membership.

c. “Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.” The purpose of Christ in the Great Commission is not fully met, however, when people are discipled and baptized; they must also be taught. A lifetime of learning and obeying follows conversion, until disciples are conformed to the image of their Lord.

What they are to be taught is “all that I have commanded you”—not what they may want to hear, nor what the teacher may want to say, but what Christ himself has taught. This is what they are to “observe,” that is, to believe and to obey.

Where is all the teaching of Jesus Christ to be found? The correct answer is not “in his discourses in the Gospels” but “in the whole Bible.” Properly understood, the teaching of Jesus Christ includes the Old Testament (for he sets his seal upon its truth and its authority), the Gospels (in which his own words are recorded), and the rest of the New Testament (which contains the teaching of the apostles through whom he continued to speak, in order to complete his self-revelation).

This, then, is the Lord’s own command: to instruct converts with biblical teaching. And it is important that from the very beginning they understand that the Bible’s teaching is Christ’s teaching. Those who have become disciples of Christ and have been baptized into Christ are to be taught what Christ commanded. They must learn to submit their minds to all, not just to some, of the teaching of Christ, if their conversion is to include their intellect. The disciples of Jesus may not select from his teaching what they like and reject what they dislike. Jesus is their Teacher and Lord, and they are under his authority and his instruction. “You call me Teacher and Lord,” he says to them, “and you are right, for so I am” (John 13:13). This lays upon the evangelist the solemn responsibility of being a good disciple himself, for how can he teach converts all that Christ has commanded if he does not himself submit to this expectation?

This is the Risen Lord’s conception of evangelism—a conception considerably more balanced and comprehensive than the usual view today. To be loyal to his commission, the evangelist must have three major concerns: first, conversion to Christ; second, the church membership of converts; and third, their instruction in all the teaching of Christ.

While it is no doubt legitimate to concentrate on the first concern in sporadic evangelistic missions and crusades, at the same time adequate provision must be made for admitting converts to church membership and for instructing them.

3. The promise he uttered: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Thus the promise in the first chapter of Matthew regarding “Emmanuel, God with us” (Matt. 1:23) is confirmed and further fulfilled in the last.

The Great Commission should never be isolated from its context. Here in Matthew it is preceded by the announcement of Christ’s authority and followed by the promise of Christ’s presence. Without these, no one could obey Christ’s commission. How could anyone go forth to make disciples for Christ, to baptize them, and to teach them if he had no assurance of Christ’s authority behind him and no assurance of Christ’s presence beside him?

This was not the first time Christ had promised his disciples his risen presence. Earlier in this Gospel (18:20) he had said he would be in their midst when only two or three disciples were gathered. Now, as he repeats the promise of his presence, he attaches it rather to their witness than to their worship. It is not only when the Church meets in his Name but when it goes in his Name that he promises to be with it. The emphatic “I” who pledges his presence is the One who has universal authority and who sends forth his people. It remains questionable, then, whether a stay-at-home church—disobedient to the Great Commission, and indifferent to the need of the nations—is in any position to claim or inherit the fullness of Christ’s promised presence.

But to those who go, who go into the world as Christ came into the world, who sacrifice their ease and comfort and independence, who hazard their lives in search of disciples—to them the presence of the living Christ is promised. In sending them out, he yet accompanies them. “Go,” he says, and “Lo! I am with you”—with you in the person of the Holy Spirit to restrain you and direct you, to encourage and empower you (cf. Acts 14:27). “I am with you always”—in days of safety and of peril, days of failure and of success, days of freedom to preach and days of restriction and persecution, days of peace and of conflict and war—“to the close of the age.” The promise of Christ spans the whole gospel age. Although the Christ who is speaking here has only recently died and been raised from death, he even now looks ahead to his return in glory. He who has just inaugurated the new age promises to be with his people from its beginning to its end, from its inauguration to its consummation.

The great sweep of this best-known version of the Great Commission is striking:

1. Christ claimed to have been given all authority in heaven and on earth.

2. Therefore he sends the Church to make disciples of all the nations.

3. He bids those he sends to transmit to these disciples all his teaching.

4. He promises to be with his people all the days, even “to the end of time” (NEB).

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

An institutional funeral too often becomes a service for the burial of human secrets. A few years ago I held services for a mentally retarded patient with severe brain damage who had suffered through one day of pain after another until, at the age of twenty-one, his body had screamed “enough!” Only the father joined me in this service; the mother had more important things to do. On the way to the cemetery, I asked the father whether this boy had been his only child. Proudly he showed me pictures of his other two sons, both in college. I asked, “And how do they feel about the loss of their brother?” In a matter-of-fact voice he answered, “Oh, they don’t know they had a mentally retarded brother in an institution. We never told them.” I wish I could say this was an extraordinary attitude, but it is all too common.

A secret, according to the dictionary, is something that is “put apart, separate, hidden from others, revealed to none or few.” This is how many mentally retarded persons are treated throughout their lives. Every age has its special way of handling those who are “different.” In medieval times the retarded were objects of ridicule; many were drafted into the cruel position of court jester. More recently, many of us can remember the “village idiot” or moron and how we helped play cruel hoaxes on him. In this age of enlightenment we no longer play jokes on the mentally retarded; we simply hide them from view. They become a secret. How often we read the tragic account of a mental retardate locked in a room by parents who zealously guarded their secret. Sometimes after a retardate has been institutionalized, the family move, so they can make a new start and pretend the absent member does not exist. A hospital is sometimes instructed to send all letters to the family in plain envelopes.

A child need not have a normal I.Q. to realize that he has been kept a secret by his parents. I well remember Gloria, a teen-age patient whose mother died suddenly. I went to her and told her of the death as gently as I could. Instead of tears, her face formed hard lines; in place of a quiver in her voice there was a sarcasm I hadn’t heard before as she said, “Why should I cry? I didn’t even know my mother!”

Nineteen per cent of the population falls under the minimum normal I.Q. of 90. Roughly speaking, then, one out of every five persons is mentally retarded, either by brain damage (which can be helped but not cured) or by cultural deprivation (which can be solved through education).

In the past, the Church has treated the mentally retarded as strangers. It has often disturbed me to realize that the Church can discover an unknown pagan tribe in the heart of New Guinea and yet seem completely unaware of the mentally retarded in the very shadow of its steeples. Surely the soul of a retarded child is of equal worth with the soul of a jungle pagan. The difference is, I suppose, the element of glamour.

For the past ten years, I have been greeted in one of my ward services, by a young man who keeps telling me he is soon to have a visit from his family’s pastor. So far this pastor hasn’t visited him; if he did, however, he would probably bring more joy than he could bring to a dozen Sunday-morning congregations.

In fairness to the Church, we should say it is a sleeping giant that is slowly awakening to its responsibilities in many areas of life. Mental retardation is more and more coming to its attention.

Three years ago, in an attempt to learn just what the churches were doing in this matter, I surveyed eighteen Protestant denominations, both conservative and liberal. The results of my little survey (sixteen of the eighteen replied) were quite revealing. Several denominations may well take pride in their accomplishments. Others have a long way to go. Still others have yet to make a start. I will not mention any denominations by name; the name matters little. What is being done, or left undone, is the important thing.

One official gave me the idea that his denomination, one of the larger ones, would like to do more but that interest was lacking at the local-church level. He said: “It has fallen to me to invite correspondence from parishes desiring to institute a class for the retarded. I haven’t heard from anywhere near 100 parishes.… If we have [mentally retarded], their presence is the best-kept secret in the church.” The only thing this large denomination was doing was to send a representative to the National Council of Churches’ Committee for the Christian Education of Exceptional Persons, which was working on a curriculum for the mentally retarded.

I would be the last to discourage united effort in curriculum development, but perhaps we should take inventory. Perhaps we are spending too much time and effort developing a specialized curriculum that very few of the mentally retarded can understand, let alone read.

Nearly all the denominations had one or more clergymen working as full-or part-time chaplains in institutions for the mentally retarded. But what support were these chaplains receiving from their denominations? A typical comment was: “State institutions should receive more than local support. We received a request from the————school, where the Protestant chaplain happens to be a member of our denomination, and discovered to our chagrin that none of our activities had budgets that could be stretched to cover this request.”

I was appalled at a brisk statement from a representative of a major denomination that is making remarkable strides in human relations. In regard to mental retardation, he said: “Denominationally, we are doing nothing.” He went on to say that the church was working with the NCC on curriculum development.

But several denominations had shifted into high gear and become leaders in work with the mentally retarded. Two had developed their own curricula and were using them with good results. One of these had also produced a filmstrip on how to start special classes for the mentally retarded. At least two other denominations were developing their own curricula for church-school classes. In one large denomination, 300 churches were working with mentally retarded. At least two denominations had a seminar for ministers and a workshop for teachers. Another was holding special religious-education classes and day-care programs for retarded children.

A very high percentage of the denominations were cooperating in projects with the National Council of Churches and with local councils. Among the cooperative projects were these: the Connecticut Council of Churches had prepared some material for institutionalized retarded teen-agers; the Minnesota Council of Churches had held a number of two-week laboratory schools for teachers of retarded persons; the Greater Philadelphia Council of Churches had a pilot Sunday school for mentally retarded children.

The denominations that were assuming leadership in the field owned and operated several homes for the mentally retarded. Perhaps this was the key to their success. They dared open doors to those who found no welcome elsewhere.

The survival of the Church depends upon its interpretation of the word others! The Church cannot include the retired and exclude the retarded; it cannot include the lawyer and exclude the delinquent; it cannot include the doctor and exclude the mentally ill. The Church must be all-inclusive—not only in name, but in action.

One well-known preacher tells of watching a group of refugee children at a registration desk. His attention was attracted by a little girl with uncombed hair and tattered clothes. When the man at the desk asked her, “What’s your name, little girl?,” through her tears she replied, “I’m nobody’s nothing, I’m nobody’s nothing!”

The mentally retarded want to be remembered by a church that has too long forgotten. They have a longing to belong. And they do not deserve to be considered “nobody’s nothing.”

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

Since Harvard’s birth in 1636, American colleges and universities have exerted a spiritual influence on the country. Harvard was patterned after Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which has been described as the most Puritan of the Cambridge colleges. Yale was patterned after Harvard, Princeton was a duplicate of Yale founded by Yale graduates, and Yale and Princeton were models for practically all the early Midwestern colleges. Even the early state-supported institutions had a concern for the perpetuation of what might be termed religious culture.

After the Revolutionary War, deism permeated the campuses. Lyman Beecher, a student at Yale in 1795, described the religious conditions in the college:

The college was in a most ungodly state. The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and rowdies were plenty. Wine and liquors were kept in many rooms, intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common.

In 1801, only four or five students were members of the college church. At Princeton, noted for its evangelistic fervor a generation before, only two students professed themselves Christians in 1782. The spiritual impact of the American campus was practically nil.

The Revival of 1800 reached to the college campuses. Yale President Timothy Dwight’s sermon, “You Must Take Your Side,” stirred his college community. By 1802, over half of the student body (which then numbered 160) had united with the church.

The same spirit spread to other campuses. The foreign missionary movement received its earliest inspiration at Williams College when five undergraduates decided to dedicate their lives to winning the heathen for Christ. They were later influential in creating the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the mission agency of the Congregational churches.

By the 1830s, the Christian title was running strong in America. There was a concerted effort to win the frontier for Christ, and denominational colleges were destined to play a significant role.

The reasons given for the founding of frontier colleges reflect this spiritual enthusiasm. Again and again one finds such phrases as: “for the education of young men for the ministry”; “to prepare men who should feed the flock of God”; “a missionary establishment for planting the Gospel on a new field.”

But toward the end of the nineteenth century, theological liberalism swept from Europe to America. Darwinism and historical criticism had their way on the campuses of this country, and state institutions began to emphasize what might be called “secular culture.” By the beginning of the twentieth century, these secularized state institutions more and more set the educational pattern for the nation. Christian foundations weakened, and the spiritual impact of the American campuses was threatened.

But though the trend in educational circles was away from Christianity, many voluntary student Christian movements sprang up. These included the YMCA, the YWCA, and, perhaps most significantly, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions that originated at a student Christian conference under Dwight L. Moody.

Bible institutes and Bible colleges also began in the United States during this period. They have, of course, played a great part in the evangelical Christian movement.

As scientism flourished after World War I, the impact of Christianity on the campuses lessened. The longing for security came to the fore. The great depression rocked man, but his survival led him to commitment to a humanly directed universe. The post-World War II generation was an “uncertain” one, and the spiritual tone of the campuses registered this uncertainty.

The number of college students has risen meteorically—from 200,000 in 1900 to 4,000,000 in 1963; the estimate for 1970 is 10,000,000. In 1900, one in twenty-five high school graduates sought a college degree; today nearly one-third do.

With all this growth, there are many new problems for the Christian community on the modern university campus.

Students are confronted on campus by divergent convictions and codes that seem to have the same validity as their own. Many come to the university attempting to find answers to life but become disillusioned, concluding that they are getting more questions than answers. Many quit; some join hippie colonies; others become “loners” and seek the meaning of life elsewhere.

The university gives the appearance of being a close community of people who share the search for truth, a place of learning where everyone reads books and talks about worthwhile things. This appearance of unity is deceptive, however; the university is really a broken, fragmented community. Its members talk of ideas but their talk lacks a common language. Faculty members really are not in touch with one another. They see the part as the whole. No wonder the student, caught up daily in this fragmentation of truth, is bewildered.

Nathan M. Pusey, president of Harvard, tells what the student is seeking:

What every young person seeks in college from liberal education—whether or not he has articulated this—is self-discovery.… What such a person wants—what we all want—is a meaning that becomes a motivating force in our lives. And when we ask this question, whether we are conscious of it or not, we have begun to think religiously, and have begun to ask of God [“Religion’s Role in Liberal Education,” Religion and Freedom of Thought, 1954].

But students are not achieving this self-discovery they seek. In the last editorial of the Yale Daily News in 1962, a student speaks for himself:

Most of us graduate unsure of life’s calling. Yet Yale, which has determined the kind of life we seek, has imposed substantial barriers in the way of that life’s accomplishment. The university has demonstrated how the daily existence of most Americans can be criticized, even ridiculed, without prescribing the formula for a useful, rewarding life—and without showing how one can reconcile himself to a ridiculous world.

The spiritual force of the campus in recent days has been spent largely in revolt. Irving Kristol says it is, “above all, an existentialist revolt”: “the students are in rebellion, not so much because things are bad for them or for others, but because things are what they are for them and for others” (“What’s Bugging the Students,” The Atlantic, November, 1965).

There is an alarming increase of drug-taking on the campuses today. Jeremy Larner, writing in the Atlantic (Nov., 1965), quotes a student in an Eastern college who claimed he had not known of a college party anywhere in the past two years where at least one-third of the kids had not been “turned on.” The use of drugs indicates the seeking nature of the student, and also points to the failure of the church on the campus.

Larner says that one of the most common, popular, and easily induced drug delusions is the fantasy of rebirth. The great American dream, he writes, is to find an absolute truth. This is illustrated by the politician’s resort to the idea that the United States is to play a divinely ordained role in directing the progress of the world. Larner quotes D. H. Lawrence, who said of Americans: “Some [insist] on the plumbing, and some on saving the world; these being the two great American specialties.” The LSD missionaries attempt to do both at once—“to save the world by tinkering with the internal plumbing.” The idea is that happiness and fulfillment can be found through the “ingestion of a synthesized additive.”

If Larner’s description is true, it points to a tragic lack of spiritual power in the churches today. The Christian message to all men, on campus and off, is the message of both the necessity and the possibility of a new birth. It is the message of happiness and fulfillment found not through the ingestion of a synthesized additive but through the indwelling of a glorious Person. How can the Church have failed so miserably to give this message to the student of today?

The American campus was a positive spiritual force; it is a lesser spiritual force today; but its spiritual potential is staggering. The present student generation, perhaps more than any other, recognizes injustice, and wants to do something about it. It is encouraging that many students today recognize the problems of human relations, realize their personal lack for these needs, and are seeking an adequate source of solution. For this reason the potential of the American campus for a positive spiritual force is greater now than ever before. How can this potential be realized, both in church-related institutions and in those with no church ties?

About one-third of all degree-granting and two-year colleges in the United States are in some way related to a church body. These relationships vary greatly, and the colleges themselves vary greatly, also, both in philosophy and in quality. There is no real meeting of the minds among them as to their basic purposes and functions.

The church-related colleges do not have the spiritual impact they should in our day. Many have tried to pattern themselves after the larger secular universities, and, to quote Myron F. Wicke’s words, “have become pale imitations.… The result has been a bloated curriculum, an inefficiency in use of resources and personnel, and a confused educational goal” (The Church-Related College, 1964). Yet the Church has in its colleges the best place for dialogue between biblical theology and other academic disciplines. Church-related colleges should not have to do the evangelistic work of the churches; they should train committed young people to face the secular world.

In the early colleges there was a real sense of mission, of the Christian’s obligation to make Christ known. Revivals on college campuses were not unusual. The enthusiasm of the early colleges to share Christ with others must be recaptured—not through “revival meetings” as such, but through the recovery of an unashamed devotion to Christ and an aggressive witness for him.

It seems to me, also, that church-related colleges must become unapologetically Christian. They must take a firm stand on the Word of God. Unfortunately, church-related colleges house many of those students who go to college to discover answers to life’s problems but find they get more questions than answers.

Church-related colleges have not had the spiritual impact they could and should have because many of them are lacking in academic quality. They need faculty members of outstanding ability, firm Christian conviction, and warm hearts who can attract exciting students and have an influence on their lives.

But most of our five to six million college students are in non-church-related schools. What kind of training are they getting? In the secular universities we have the greatest opportunity ever to make a genuine spiritual impact on the world. Most students feel that Christianity is irrelevant, a relic of the past, and that the Church is behind the times. One professor suggested that his history students become acquainted with a local Inter-Varsity group because its members were the only persons he knew who indulged in the medieval practice of an all-pervading God-consciousness. The Church must show the relevance of the Gospel to the student’s present and future way of life.

I am convinced that the secular university can best be penetrated by faculty members and students in various academic disciplines who are genuinely Christian, who are faithful in their university tasks, and who have an understanding of the current movements among college students. The person who is lax or slipshod in his own work has very little witness to the person who does his work well.

One area of concern is that Christian professors are often reluctant to teach from their religious perspective, even though it seems imperative that they do so. Their colleagues who believe in scientific humanism, for example, are certainly not bashful about teaching from their perspective. I believe the university student should hear the Christian view as a live option. The failure of the Christian professor to present it seems to say to the student that though Christianity may have some value in practical life, it is really irrelevant to intellectual life.

However, it is not enough for the Christian professor to teach from his Christian perspective; he also must have a personal relationship with his students. The friendship of a Christian professor who excels in his field with a brilliant young student who does not know Christ could have an earth-shaking effect.

The local churches also must be involved. In this day of travel, more and more students commute. There is hardly a church that does not have at least one member enrolled in a college. Pastors must prepare to minister to these students, and to help train them for service to Christ. They must take the university more seriously and try to understand and love it. They must keep up with the theological and social issues of the day and must speak to them.

Something must happen on the campus before anything will happen through the campus. I believe with all my heart that the American campus holds the greatest potential for positive spiritual force in the world, and I also believe that today that force can be released. Here on the campuses of America are tomorrow’s leaders in government, industry, science, medicine, and home life. Here are tomorrow’s university professors. Here also are many thousands of foreign students who, almost without exception, are the cream of the crop in their homeland. Here are the leaders for the nations of the world. What a tremendous impact for Christ across the world if they could be won!

Here on our campuses are the missionaries, the evangelists who can evangelize the world. They must be led to acknowledge the Lordship of Christ in their lives, and then, wherever they go in their varied vocations, they will be evangelists. The campus must be reached with the Gospel, inspired by the challenge, motivated to service, if its great potential is to be realized.

In the past the American campus has seen times of the waxing and waning of spiritual force. Today the positive spiritual force of the campus is not being exerted. But I believe we stand near the beginning of a change, the coming of a new day. A group of Prostestant monks in France has this motto: “Do not be afraid to precede the dawn.” Let the Church claim that phrase for itself.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

In this final third of the twentieth century, man faces chaos in knowledge. Acquisition of information has accelerated at such a rate over the past two decades that man has not yet caught up with and assimilated all he has discovered. Even computers have not enabled him to break the log-jam. Perhaps he will eventually “catch up with himself,” but even if he does, he will still be unable to integrate his thinking unless his whole outlook changes radically.

Modern man’s real trouble is that his thought lacks an over-arching unifying principle. His scientific studies point to a coherent universe governed by laws and principles that apply not only to this planet but also to the moon, Mars, Venus, and the farthest galaxies. Nevertheless he generally views this universe, indeed all reality, as the product of completely random forces. He therefore has no philosophy that gives both an adequate, or even possible, explanation of the universe and a means of unifying knowledge. Neither chance nor mystery provides a principle of integration.

Early in the sixteenth century man was on the way to reaching much the same position, and for the same reasons. Technical knowledge was increasing rapidly, and philosophical skepticism, the result of medieval attempts to synthesize a “sacramentalized” Christianity with pagan Greek thought, tended to destroy the idea of a unified structure of thought. At that point the Reformation exercised a powerful restraint upon the centrifugal tendency. Both Luther and Melancthon had an important influence, but Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, with its stress on the sovereignty of God and the redeeming kingship of Christ, probably did even more to stem the upsurge of irrationalism in European thought.

Today, more than four centuries later, man has come full circle, and Christians again must assert their belief that only in Christ can men find unity of knowledge.

When they do this, they simply echo Christ’s own words. More than once he insisted that he is the Truth, which in the deepest sense means that the true meaning of anything is vitally related to him. When the Apostle Paul declared that all the riches of wisdom and learning are bound up with Christ, he meant that man sees the universe—including himself and his fellow men—truly and in a unified manner only when he sees it in Christ’s light. This was also the view of the New Testament Church, and it was forcefully expressed by Augustine of Hippo, particularly in his City of God.

Most evangelicals today agree that in Christ alone one may find a true understanding of the universe and therefore true unity of knowledge, and that in Christ alone scientific pursuits and accomplishments are possible. Yet often they fail to show how Christ is the key to full human understanding. One reason may be the fear that acknowledging Christ’s lordship will endanger their independence or “freedom.” As one Christian professor put it, “we cannot so exalt God that man becomes a cipher; man has to have some freedom.”

Other Christians, though they accept Christ’s absolute lordship over all spheres of human endeavor, simply have not bothered to think deeply about the unity of truth in Christ. As a result, the concept remains vague for them, and they cannot explain it to anyone else. It is important, then, to consider some of the principal aspects of Christ’s unifying function.

A proper perspective on this subject must stem from Christianity’s basic monotheism and its two corollaries. The first corollary is that there is one God, and he is absolutely sovereign (Isa. 45:5 ff.; Deut. 4:35, 39; Eph. 1:11). This doctrine runs through the whole of biblical teaching. Behind all that is or happens is the coherence and unity of the one personal God. Although man cannot grasp the complexity or completeness of this unity, still the unity exists. Thus for Christianity the unity of all things derives not from a “general principle” of philosophy, mathematics, or some other discipline but from the eternal uniqueness of the sovereign God.

The second corollary is that within the godhead are three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Of these three, the Son, the “Word,” is specifically the revealer of God. There is no other means by which man can know the one God (Matt. 11:27; Col. 1:15) and the unity in that sovereign God of all things, including knowledge. The Christian believes Christ has expressed this unity both in the very nature of reality and by direct statement to man.

Christ has brought all things into existence out of nothing (John 1:3; Col. 1:16, 17). He has created both the “object” and the “subject” of knowledge, both the knower and the known. In his creative wisdom and power he has formed all the structures of the universe along with their complex interrelations, and thus has manifested the divine glory and wisdom spoken of in Psalm 19. This revelation by creation provides the unity man requires in his artistic and scientific pursuits; without it he would have no assurance that any one fact, including himself, was related to any other fact. The sovereign divine plan and purpose behind creation integrates the whole of temporal reality. Whether man studies the distant stars, the sub-atomic structure of matter, or the actions of man or beast, a basic oneness underlies all phenomena because they are all the product of divine wisdom, purpose, and action.

Creation, however, has not ended the divine self-revelation, for the Son is also the sustainer and upholder of all things. As Calvin pointed out, God sustains and governs all things by the secret operation of his Spirit (Institutes I,6,1; cf. also his comments on Ps. 19:1; Isa. 40:22; Acts 17:18). All things—from the smallest particle of energy to the mightiest heavenly galaxy—continue to exist and act according to the laws of their particular structures because God so wills, sustains, and governs them (Ps. 104; 107; Matt. 6:26–34; Col. 1:17). Everything depends on him. There is a basic unity to the universe, for it reveals the one God who not only originally created all things but also keeps them in existence and motion, from moment to moment.

This brings us to an important question, one on which Christians disagree. Some, seeking to protect man’s “freedom,” say that man has the unique ability to break that divine unity in the universe. At least in the intellectual sphere, they say, man must be truly independent of God in order to be truly man. But Scripture does not support this idea, for it constantly asserts God’s sovereignty over all human actions (Isa. 45; Rom. 9 and 10; Eph. 1:11). True, it never attempts to explain the relation between God’s sovereign rule and man’s responsibility; it simply insists that God is sovereign and man is responsible (cf. Acts 2:23). These two teachings the Christian must accept on faith.

The real trouble with man is that he has lost this biblical view of God’s sovereignty and so of the unity of all creation. Originally he recognized God as his lord and thus realized the unity of all knowledge in him, though he did not understand the actual relation of the various parts. The essence of man’s fall was his denial that God was sovereign, and particularly that all knowledge centered in God. Man came to believe he could obtain valid knowledge and give a correct interpretation of the universe without reference to God. Scripture describes what happened: “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” the tempter promised (Gen. 3:5), and “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Rom. 1:22). When man turned his back upon God, he lost all capacity to obtain any unity of knowledge and came to view reality as the product of disparate forces, whether of demons, of impersonal nature, or of chance. He still seeks a logical and coherent explanation for the chaos. To find the answer, however, he invariably frames some immanent, man-made “law” or “principle” of intellectual unity that ultimately disintegrates before the facts of the universe.

This human search for unity in itself seems to indicate that an ultimate unity does exist. If the universe were merely the product of an absolute chance, it would be hard to understand why man seeks unity of knowledge. To the Christian, even unbelieving man’s desire for ultimate coherence is the work of the Son, who restrains man’s sinful tendency to irrationalism. Man, despite his denials, still has a God-given sense of the unity of all things and is therefore able to gain some insight into created reality, through the concepts of law, of gravity, and of relativity, to name a few.

But when man does acquire such knowledge, he always misuses it for selfish ends. He cannot see any relation between his scientific knowledge and his ethical action, for to see this he needs more than a general impression of the unity of the physical universe; he must have a special divine revelation to give him a true understanding of the unity of all things in Christ.

Therefore God did not leave man with only an indirect knowledge of himself. Not only does he speak indirectly (Acts 17:24ff.) through creation and providence; he also speaks directly through his inspired prophets. In the Scriptures the Son constantly reveals to Israel and to all men that God remains lord despite their disobedience, that they can be delivered from sin only by returning to him in repentance and faith (Ps. 19; Isa. 45:20 ff.), and that, returning, they can find true understanding—that is, true unity of knowledge. This became crystal clear when the Son of God, the Word himself coming to man as Redeemer, enabled man once again to know the sovereign God as his Lord, and therefore as the focal point of all his knowledge of reality. For in Christ “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). Those who know the Son know God, the source of all there is to know.

This means that Christ becomes to the Christian the integrating principle of all knowledge because he created, sustains, and redeems both the knower and the object of his knowledge (Rom. 8:23 ff.). The redeemed man now sees light in Christ’s light. True, he does not claim to know how all things are related to one another and to the divine central point. But he does believe that all knowledge is so bound together that it is part of one great system, founded, not upon some abstract logical or mathematical principle, but upon the person of the living, risen Lord, who by his Spirit leads his people into all truth.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

Some thirty college and university libraries now make CHRISTIANITY TODAY available on microfilm (a service provided by University Microfilms Inc., 313 N. First Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48107). Across the years this magazine has won its way as a thought journal; our readers are interested, not merely in entertainment or polemic, but in a vindication of the truth.

Some people live their whole lives just around the corner from the world of truth. Yet active engagement in the realm of ideas is one of man’s unique privileges.

The other night I was thumbing through the Great Books Syntopicon, that eight-year achievement by 100 scholars at the cost of $1,000,000. (When first projected, its cost was estimated at $60,000; someone apparently had a wrong idea about the price of publishing.) What a good dictionary is to the world of words, the Syntopicon is to the world of important ideas. From this idea-index to the “great books,” any student can discover whose ideas he has been using and—if he reads long enough—what ideas he ought not to be caught with.

Although the Bible is not included in the set of “great books” (literate readers were presumed to own a version of their preference), the Great Book is nonetheless “idea-indexed” (along with the Apocrypha). The Bible has its say, in fact, on virtually all the Syntopicon’s 102 “great ideas.” Anyone who thinks revealed religion requires a “ghetto”-epistemology should ponder this challenge to get into the “great conversation” of our times.

He was a fellow minister of like mind with me and it was about five years ago when he said it: “How have so many things slipped so far so fast?” And now, five years later, a young college chaplain—age thirty-two to be exact—has said to me: “I must be getting old. I cannot imagine what has happened to the students in the last five years. They have really gone wild.”

So what has happened and how did it happen?

Everybody knows there has been a profound theological shift in our generation. What and How? Increasingly I have come to believe that the real starting place for modern theology is found in Schleiermacher; in fact, a close reading of Schleiermacher can give the clue to almost everything that has happened since. It is an oversimplification but a sound one to say that his departure from sharp doctrinal definition and the authority of the written Word, coupled with his emphasis on individualism and especially the “feeling” of the individual as authority in religion, set all kinds of things in motion. In his case and in his time, “feeling” in religion served to point out and perhaps support orthodoxy; what has followed in his train, however, has held on to individual “feeling” but somewhere mislaid the orthodoxy.

Kierkegaard was also highly individualistic in his emphasis. He fought all his life against the reasonings of Hegel (and there might be good reasons for fighting Hegel); he attacked the organized church and especially the state church (which he called Christendom); and always, if one may simplify Kierkegaard, he underlined the existential response in faith of the individual in his awareness of God.

As everyone knows, Barth drew on Kierkegaard and certainly on Schleiermacher. Even with his great contributions of the Word, the Living Word, the responses of faith, and even with such strong points of orthodoxy as his view of the radical nature of sin and acceptance of canonical Scripture and very evident elevation of Christ, still, in the last analysis, for Barth a man’s response is only under an existential authority; the written Word of Scripture and the definitions of theology give no absolutes in his system. This open-endedness is illustrated by Barth’s refusal to be called a Barthian. He has always insisted on the incompleteness of his system in view of what the total situation might bring next year or even next week.

Reinhold Niebuhr brought this kind of theology to life in ethical practice. Man-made institutions are limited because they are man-made, and therefore democracy is under judgment, as is Communism. A good case can certainly be made for this sort of thing, and Niebuhr made it. Then came the leap. The Church is also man-made, and the Scriptures are a guide only relatively, because they are the words of men conditioned by the cultures and also by men’s ignorance. Along with Schleiermacher and Barth, Niebuhr readily accepted much of the Scriptures as legend or mythos or confusion about the cosmos.

In this tradition, it followed by logical necessity that Bultmann was enabled to erect and sustain the demythologizing process; thus much of the Gospels and also much else was subjected to the most radical criticism. The authority of “It stands written” was undermined for the sake of the language and thought-modes of the twentieth century. At last men had reached maturity! They were no longer under the judgment of the Bible; the Bible was under the judgment of men. God speaks through the Scriptures, and man responds in obedience only according to his personal existential situation.

All kinds of lesser lights appeared. There was John A. T. Robinson with Honest to God, and Joseph Fletcher with Situation Ethics. And before long Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, and others went past the Scriptures and shot God down. So now there is a theology where God himself is dead, and an ethic where no rules still hold.

It is hard to know to what extent theology in the last century has affected disciplines and to what extent it has been affected by them. Whatever the answer, everything seems to be “up for grabs” in every discipline. What are the canons of modern art? Who can say what constitutes proper harmony or dissonance in modern music? The Constitution is always a matter of interpretation, frequently subjected to the pressures of the moment. Often laws are not only conditioned by but also undermined by equity. In education, Deweyism has made everyone wary of absolutes and of rules. At this point no self-respecting institution can keep from endless tampering with its curriculum. In ethics and social action there are no fixed points. Revolutions understand how to destroy, but they are no longer like the American Revolution, for they lack principles for rebuilding after the revolution is over. No one can censor movies or plays or books, because to censor one must have a definition of obscenity, and even the Supreme Court cannot, apparently, define that one word. To get back to religion, how can anyone, even a bishop, be condemned for heresy? A man has to be a heretic against a doctrine or a body of doctrine, and who will define that? Meanwhile, the argument is that action must be based on the love of God; but the word “love” in popular understanding runs the gamut from Hugh Heffner to Fletcher and on to Tillich. (Significantly, large masses of Christians recognize Heffner’s name better than Tillich’s!) And so things slip.

We have gone too far, and even Harvey Cox of Harvard is willing to say so (Time, March 15, 1968, page 53). Allowing for the fact that Time does not always quote a man at his best, and that some of what they quote from Cox sounds sophom*oric, we have at least these words: “The world is important but not ultimately so”; “The recent focus of theology has been on doubt, unbelief, or on the church’s mission to the world.… What has been missing is the joy of serving”; or again, “Once you transform everything into a mission for social action and lose the intrinsic joy of the spirit of worship, you are in danger in losing both.”

This begins to sound better. The Puritans used to say: “Truth is toward action.” Right! It is about time now to talk about the Truth.

On March 31, while President Lyndon B. Johnson announced plans to de-escalate the Viet Nam war, churchmen opening a “world peace conference” deplored U. S. hawkishness. Before the time gap was bridged, a Soviet delegate to the Prague assembly called all involved countries to a peaceful settlement of the conflict. When an East German pointed out that the same words and mild tone should not apply to both aggressor and victim, most delegates agreed to table the peace assault.

But verbal attacks on the United States were just beginning. Russian Orthodox Archbishop Michael led off with a stinging attack on “U. S. imperialism”—in “full conformity,” according to a West German newsman, “with the view of the Soviet government.”

That evening a Roman Catholic leader of South Viet Nam’s National Liberation Front charged “American pirates and their lackeys” with “crimes against us Christians of South Viet Nam” and praised the “sacred resistance” of those he represented. Joseph Maria Ho Hue Ba, who had hiked and hiked his way to Hanoi to make his first visit outside South Viet Nam, offered “profound thanks to … American Christians, youth, students, intellectuals and workers for … their acts of opposition to the repulsive war of aggression which the Johnson government is waging on our territory.… We especially call on our American friends to act still more energetically in order to force the Johnson government to end its aggression against Viet Nam.” The 75-year-old catechist got a nearly unanimous standing ovation when he commented appreciatively, “In their powerful [Tet] offensive, millions of men, among them many Christians, rose up.”

But other peace demands also clamored for the delegates’ attention. Most immediate were those of the host country, where liberalization was taking its first steps, and of other Eastern satellite states, where similar policies had reached various stages.

The Czech Revolution

Lyndon B. Johnson’s unexpected move toward de-escalation was not the only peace step to win attention in Prague. Shortly before the conference began, Czechoslovakia’s parliament replaced the country’s hardline president with the more moderate Alexander Dubcek, culminating several months of bloodless revolution. Resulting liberalization of censorship, election laws, and economic policies prompted Christian Peace Conference founder and president J. L. Hromádka to say of his country, “We are in the midst of a great renewal.”

The new privileges mean greater responsibilities for the Church, he said. “We have always excused ourselves that we could do nothing in our country because we were under pressure. Now all the pressure which may have existed has been eliminated.”

Although international ties are still restricted because Czech foreign policy remains unchanged, the new national openness seems to be easing relations between church and state. Mrs. Erika Kalecova, new head of the state office on the churches, said Christians and Marxists “can either live together or die together. It seems better for us to live together.”

One sign of change is state willingness to review what one government official called “mistakes in juridical procedure” during the Stalinist 50s. Baptists petitioned for review of spy charges that jailed thirteen ministers. Although the ten still living are free, they have no civil rights or old-age pensions and cannot serve as pastors.

Roman Catholics asked the government to allow Joseph Cardinal Beran to return from Rome as Archbishop of Prague and Primate of Czechoslovakia. Two religious orders are being reestablished; they had all but died out after 1960 decisions forced monks and nuns into “productive” work.

Although East-West conflicts seemed to approach reconciliation, other tensions appeared between the rich North and the area called the Third World, the poor South. Delegates from nearly sixty countries heard speakers from Uruguay, Madagascar, and Japan describe social and technological needs on their continents.

“Save Man—Peace Is Possible” heralded the conference theme, but opinion varied on how to reach a better, peaceful world. “That we as Christians have encountered … Jesus Christ and are continuously confronted by him in faith does not release us in any way,” said G. Casalis of France, “but on the contrary obligates us to work, to struggle, and to sacrifice … together with men of different world views.”

Not many such conventions see results of their talks and resolutions almost before the words hit the mimeograph machine. As Mennonite editor Maynard Shelly reported, a funny thing had indeed happened to the seven hundred churchmen on their way to another resolution against American bombs over North Viet Nam. Yet the Prague peacemakers reacted cautiously to news of the American bombing pause.

And they were not alone. Other clergymen, like WCC head Eugene Carson Blake, considered the action a “move in the right direction, the type of decision many people around the world have been asking for.” Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, a cochairman of the U. S. Interreligious Committee on Peace, agreed the decision indicated “the power of the peoples’ will in a democracy.” That interpretation gained support in a telegram to President Johnson from twenty-three U. S. Episcopal bishops. Reminding him of their request last September for a move toward de-escalation, they commended the President “for this step which we hope and pray will be the first in a move toward an end to this tragic war and toward a lasting peace.”

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., of Yale was “a little skeptical and quite apprehensive that the bombing halt will lead to more escalation.” And James H. Forest of the Catholic Peace Fellowship had only “severely muted enthusiasm” for the partial compliance with North Viet Nam’s request for a bombing halt. Another Roman Catholic, Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, recently returned from an official trip to North Viet Nam, denounced the statement as too little too late: “It is as if Hitler after Dachau issued a statement that he was ready to bargain with the Jews.”

Some churchmen from the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the NCC, and the WCC expressed their hope for Hanoi’s favorable reaction to the call for negotiation. In a wire to Nguyen Duy Trinh, WCC leaders said they “fervently hope and pray that Hanoi will respond affirmatively.… We are convinced that such response will command respect and gratitude throughout the world and will facilitate deescalation.”

AUSTRALIAN CRUSADE

Billy Graham and his team climax an intensive Australian evangelistic crusade with meetings this week in Sydney. The evangelist said that after the closing service on Sunday, April 28, he might fly to Viet Nam to hold services for troops.

Before the Sydney effort, campaigns were held in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane. Other cities and smaller communities were reached via land-line relays.

The opening of Leighton Ford’s crusade in Perth coincided with Western Australia’s state elections last month. The Ford publicity was effective enough to prompt one woman to inquire of a local radio station which party he represented. On television a high public official told of someone who confronted him with a similar query. “He issues a better class of literature, too,” a third potential Ford-for-Parliament supporter was quoted as saying.

A Perth newspaper described the airport welcome for Ford as “one of the biggest, noisiest, and best organized” the city had ever seen. Despite the 11:30 P.M. arrival time, 2,000 gathered to meet the Canadian evangelist, who had come for an eight-day crusade in Perry Lakes Stadium. Warmly supported by the Most Rev. George Appleton, Anglican archbishop of Perth, the open-air meetings held during Perth’s coldest March on record drew nearly 60,000. A much larger number listened by means of nine country radio stations and eleven land-line relays at distances up to 600 miles.

One of the notable features of the crusade was that of the 2,000 inquirers at the stadium, 92 per cent were under thirty. Perth’s only morning newspaper was consistently hostile, but other media in the city provided good coverage and gave Ford and his six-man team a further platform for their message. In addidition, Ford spoke to Rotarians, parliamentarians, and businessmen, and dealt capably with questions from students when 1,300 came to hear him at the University of Western Australia. He also stirred Christian interest in the housing situation of the aboriginals, and invited a 6,300-audience one evening to join him in praying for peace at a time when a contingent of Australia troops was leaving for Viet Nam. An aboriginal Christian leader publicly presented Ford with a boomerang with the inscribed hope that he, like it, would return.

Some 1,300 miles to the east, the Adelaide crusade opened two days later after another tumultuous (“We’re waitin’ for Leighton”) welcome at the airport. Speaking to 10,000 at Wayville Show-grounds on Acts 17, Ford was as forthright as ever. “What would Paul say if he came to Australia in 1968?” he asked. “Would he be stirred to see us given over to our idols?” The next evening, April 1, was especially for youth, and the evangelist’s topic was, “Whose Fool Are You?”

The eight-day Adelaide crusade drew a total attendance of 64,800, and there were 1,521 inquirers. Adelaide University’s Union Hall was packed to capacity, with students jamming the doors, when Ford spoke there. A group of humanists and others heckled him during much of the forty-minute address, but by the end much of the audience was obviously impressed with the message.

As in Perth, Ford billed one meeting as “Christian Action Night,” when he urged listeners to become better informed and more involved in community needs. A folder listing several social-service agencies and an outline of their programs was distributed to interest the audience in becoming volunteer workers.

An enterprising “turf consultant” wrote to Ford from Sydney, offering the crusade the chance to win $2,000 a year at a small outlay (“horse’s name to be sent in code each Friday”), but crusade secretary Alan Quee ruled out the suggestion, noting it was “somewhat inconsistent with the vital aims of the crusade.”

Meanwhile, Graham was arriving in Sydney from Fiji. En route he recognized the pilot as the one who had flown him into the same city nine years earlier—a fact confirmed by the pilot, whose teen-age son, it turned out, has been active in current crusade preparations.

From Sydney Graham flew to Brisbane, where associate evangelist John Wesley White had drawn about 28,000 to the local showgrounds the four previous evenings. Here Graham had the support of Anglican Archbishop Strong, known as a high churchman.

During the first Brisbane meeting, a gang of twenty youths created a disturbance and upended the offering box. They subsequently quieted down, however, and six went forward at the invitation. A leading Brisbane TV announcer who two days earlier had interviewed Graham on the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., came forward hand in hand with his wife at the closing meeting. For the closing Sunday service, 67,000 persons were at the Brisbane Exhibition Grounds. Graham opened his final address by asking people to stand for a minute of silent prayer “for peace in Viet Nam, for peace on the streets of America, and for the bereaved family of Martin Luther King.”

The total turnout in Brisbane was 178,500, with 4,097 inquirers. These figures did not include statistics from the forty-two land-line relays that extended the message of the crusade more than a thousand miles from Brisbane.

J. D. DOUGLAS

CANADIAN GROWING PAINS

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, founded four years ago, experienced considerable growing pains at its annual meeting in Winnipeg last month. Objection to the nominating committee’s choice for president, the Rev. Hector MacRury, threatened for a time to bring down the curtain on the young organization.

A motion to erase the slate was defeated by a hand vote. But after the Rev. William Fitch was nominated for president from the floor, his fellow Toronto Presbyterian MacRury walked out of the meeting. MacRury was last year’s vice-president and—a fact irritating to some—was a member of the nominating committee.

Several delegates said it was “the beginning of the end” for the young organization. In desperation the meeting voted to reinstate last year’s officers for an interim year, but the action had to be dropped when this turned out to be unconstitutional.

Finally Fitch, who was not present, was elected president. He had agreed to let his name be put in nomination if there was no other possibility, Fitch said later, but he declined the office after learning of the Winnipeg tensions. So the office stands vacant.

This controversy all but overshadowed another action by the fifty-four delegates. They decided to open the EFC to “congregations, institutions, organizations, and evangelical groupings” as well as to individuals. But an amendment deleted the possibility of membership by evangelical denominations. The action was a victory for members from the United and Anglican Churches, who are sensitive about domination by the smaller groups.

The “renewal” groups within these two big denominations gave reports to the meeting. In other action, delegates authorized the executives to name a social-action commission and to hire an executive secretary.

The meetings were held in downtown Calvary Temple, one of the nation’s oldest and biggest Pentecostal churches.

CHURCH PANORAMA

On Palm Sunday, Pope Paul became the first pontiff ever to recite an entire Mass in Italian in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Lutheran World Federation has appropriated $250,000 to aid Lutherans resettled in new areas under South Africa’s apartheid policy.

The Anglican-Methodist Unity Commission in England this month published the detailed union plan that is due for church action in 1968 and 1969, and warned that failure to unite would lead to schism. Meanwhile, plans for merging Congregational and Presbyterian bodies in England were postponed from 1970 to 1971.

Twenty-three missionaries from various boards working with Indians and Eskimos in Canada’s Mackenzie River basin and Western Arctic coast formed the Evangelical Fellowship of the Northwest Territories at a meeting in Yellowknife.

PERSONALIA

The widow of Paul Carlson, missionary doctor slain by Congo rebels in 1964, last month attended the opening of a medical center in his honor in Loko, the Congo. The government gave the buildings, worth $500,000, and U. S. companies donated $500,000 worth of drugs. Evangelical Covenant and other backers shipped half a ton of delicate research equipment from Chicago. The Carlson Foundation said the center, for leprosy patients, will be led by Dr. and Mrs. Wallace Thornbloom.

Pope Paul VI denied that his 1967 encyclical On the Development of Peoples intended to “open the way to the so-called theology of revolution and violence. Such an aberration is a long way from our thoughts and words. It is a very different thing from the positive, courageous and energetic activity necessary in many cases to establish new forms of social and economic progress.”

Deaths

PAUL J. HALLINAN, 56, who in less than six years as archbishop of Atlanta became a leading Roman Catholic progressive; early acts included desegregation of church schools and hospitals; in Atlanta, of hepatitis.

SIDNEY D. GAMBLE, 77, YMCA worker in China and former chairman of Church World Service; in New York.

KENNETH EUDY, Baptist pastor in Tamms, Illinois; shot to death by a farmer while counseling him and his wife about their different church memberships.

MARIO COLACCI, 57, native of Italy who left the Catholic priesthood; author, and teacher at Augsburg College and Luther Seminary; praised upon his death by the local Catholic weekly; in St. Paul, Minnesota.

PAPA EPHTHIM, 84, head of an Eastern Orthodox splinter that Turkey helped set up in 1926 to oppose the Ecumenical Patriarchate; in Istanbul.

JOHN TUTLIS, 70, apparently a near-penniless recluse who left $400,000 in mining shares to the Roman Catholic Church; in Pretoria, South Africa.

“I hope that in spite of different views and feelings we shall maintain the unity of love,” said Terence James Cooke upon being installed by Apostolic Delegate Luigi Raimondi as seventh Catholic archbishop of New York. The ceremony was attended by President Johnson, Governor Rockefeller, Mayor Lindsay, and a host of church leaders.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead, social-studies director at Fordham University’s new campus, has in the past recommended legalized childless “trial” marriages but now thinks young couples should “get legally married, use contraceptives responsibly, and risk divorce later.”

The Rev. Charles Ausherman, a Reformed Church in America pastor, was named planned-parenthood director of the National Council of Churches.

Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, 70, has retired as archbishop of Hue, South Viet Nam. He has been living in Italy since the 1963 coup against his brother, the late President Ngo Dinh Diem.

Historian Arnold Toynbee says the peace efforts of Pope Paul and the unity emphasis of Pope John have regained and extended for the papacy the moral influence it lost in the Middle Ages through abuses of power.

The Rev. Kyung Chik Han of South Korea and Bishop Chandu Ray of Pakistan were elected chairman and vice-chairman of the Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism, set for Singapore November 5–13.

Orthodox priest George Bacopulos denied a charge that the Greek government ordered him to refuse baptism to a child because arch-enemy Melina Mercouri was a godparent. The reason, said Bacopulos, is that the actress is married to a non-Christian, producer Jules Dassin, and is thus not a communicant.

Latest to quit Drew University’s seminary over last year’s firing of Dean Charles Ranson are Alfred Haas, James Ross, and William Murdock. The ten who will leave include the entire Bible staff.

Long-stagnant Conwell School of Theology in Philadelphia is hiring four new teachers for next fall, with other appointments due shortly: Philip Edg-cumbe Hughes of Columbia Theological Seminary, noted evangelical Anglican, as theology chairman; Gary Ross Collins, psychology chairman at Bethel College, Minnesota, as director of clinical training; James R. Hiles of Wellesley College in Old Testament; and Charles E. Thorne, Jr., currently completing a Ph.D. in Ireland, in church history.

Arthur S. Flemming, president of the National Council of Churches and a Methodist, is leaving the presidency of the University of Oregon to head Macalester College (United Presbyterian). Flemming, a member of the Eisenhower Cabinet, has also been president of Ohio Wesleyan.

Kent S. Knutson, graduate studies director at Luther Seminary, was nominated to the presidency of Wartburg Seminary (American Lutheran Church) in Iowa.

Edgar Carlson, 59, for twenty-four years the president of Gustavus Adolphus College (Lutheran Church in America), is resigning to direct the Minnesota Private College Council of sixteen Protestant and Roman Catholic schools.

William Banowsky, 32, of Lubbock, Texas, one of the few Churches of Christ ministers to call a debate with a Playboy editor, has been named vice-president of Pepperdine College, Los Angeles, where he will direct development of a second campus.

The Rev. Jess Moody of First Baptist Church, West Palm Beach, is acting president of Palm Beach Atlantic College, which hopes to open this fall with support from the regional Baptist Association, using the $3 million plant of Moody’s church.

Norval Hadley was named director of World Vision’s relief branch, which shipped a record tonnage of aid goods valued at $1,350,000 in the past fiscal year.

Religious Heritage of America named Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy as Clergyman of the Year. Lay awards went to Roman Catholic J. Peter Grace, head of a chemical firm, and Mrs. Stuart S. Sinclair, former president of Church Women United.

Wayne H. Cowan, 40, managing editor of Christianity and Crisis for a dozen years, was promoted to editor.

After some relatives got a free ride in a government plane, the Rev. Philip Gaglardi, a Pentecostal minister, resigned his thirteen-year post as highways minister of British Columbia.

MISCELLANY

On May 2, the State of Israel marks its twentieth anniversary.

A helicopter serving Wycliffe Bible Translators in remote areas of West Irian, Indonesia, may be the first in missionary aviation.

Most of the rare religious paintings in the Church of St. Paul, Antwerp, Belgium, were carried out and saved during a fire that destroyed the roof of the sixteenth-century structure. One, Rubens’s “The Flagellation,” is said to be worth $2.8 million.

Fifty Roman Catholic priests in Peru broke precedent by issuing a document denouncing social injustices and pledging to work for reform. They noted that 24,000 of the nation’s 12 million citizens get half its income.

The U. S. Jesuit weekly America praised the statement of the National Council of Churches made against religious repression in the Soviet Union at its last board meeting, but was “bewildered” by its “oversimplified, pushbutton foreign policy solutions.”

For the second year, bids to liberalize New York State’s abortion law failed.

What with violent student protests and other pressures, the American Council on Education reports that at least 300 U. S. colleges are without presidents and that 1,000 dean positions are vacant.

At their sixth theological meeting last month, U. S. Lutherans and Roman Catholics decided the “pressing and as yet unresolved” issue of intercommunion must await further work on the ministry, which will be the subject of September talks.

State accreditation has been won for the new Hellenic College in Brookline, Massachusetts, which plans to open in the fall as the first Greek Orthodox college in the hemisphere.