Page 6355 – Christianity Today (2024)

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A PANEL DISCUSSION BY THE EDITORS OF CHRISTIANITY TODAY

DR. HENRY: The conviction is now widespread that America is undergoing a revolution in sex morality. What role and responsibility has the press in this development? Is the press handling sex responsibly, or does it tend to miscarry the subject of sex?

MR. KUCHARSKY: I think the press in general has handled many stories and separate developments adequately. The major lack is an interpretative analysis of the decline of traditional norms in regard to sex.

DR. HENRY: A newspaper is made up of many pages. Do you regard the front page as specially delinquent?

MR. KUCHARSKY: Well, I think the decline in sex morals has been one of the major news stories of our day. Interpretative handling of this certainly belongs on the front page.

DR. BELL: When the press exploits that which harms the reader, freedom of the press is actually license. Sensational exploitation occurs when stories mention sex aberrations in detail, and for the obvious reason of titillating the readers and increasing readership. There should be, I think, a distinction between responsible reporting and exploitation of news to gain attention from individuals who would otherwise not read it.

MR. KUCHARSKY: I think that there is a failure to represent the situation adequately in this sense. Newspapers have carried over and over again the fact of the rising rate of sex crimes. But I don’t think this has been put together for the reader so he can understand the significance of this increase in comparison to past years. I think the average newspaper reader just thinks in terms of recurring sex offenses. I don’t think he realizes that there is a crisis in sex morality.

DR. FARRELL: Newspapers, particularly tabloids, have learned that sex on the front page sells newspapers, and this hunger for greater profits is not easily denied. When the editorial page then attempts to bounce back with something akin to righteous indignation over the events recounted on page one, after these events are pressed into service as sales gimmicks, editorials then have something less than a thunderous effect. You keep hearing the editor clearing his throat. But is any great degree of righteous indignation being expressed in newspaper editorials? I have not noticed such myself, although I speak as no authority but rather from a limited sampling of reading. In our post-Victorian era, editors and writers in general are much more conscious than before of the ubiquitous sin of self-righteousness, present in the “moral” man as well as in the “immoral” and breaking down any rigid distinction between the two. And the editor taking a strong moral stand on a given issue will certainly be charged with self-righteousness and pride. Yet he must face this hazard if he is going to say anything worthwhile. But there is a deeper issue. Is the editor simply a news hound or may he serve also as somewhat of a watchdog of the nation’s morals? If he is simply to reflect some moderating form of morality representative of the vast amalgam of persons comprising the country, we cannot expect much in the way of a trumpet blast for righteousness. The editor cannot, of course, be totally aloof from public opinion. But many feel that he now reflects the general slippage of national moral standards, so that something rather extraordinary is needed to evoke a tone of judgment from him.

This feature appears simultaneously in CHRISTIANITY TODAY and in The Bulletin of American Society of Newspaper Editors.

DR. HENRY: The slum district in many newspapers is the entertainment section. One cannot blame the press, of course, for Hollywood’s exploitation of sex and the theater’s current idolatry of prostitution. But there is no need for movie advertisements to drip with such passion that the reader feels he has stumbled into the privacy of a neighbor’s bedroom. Advertising policy enables the industry to import an immodest billboard technique in promoting even some quite acceptable family films. Quotations from critics often fix attention on the sex ingredient, while their reviews have lost much of the indignation that springs from moral concern and holy living. These critics enthusiastically commend such achievements as The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. But often they use a sliding standard of virtue; they tend simply to be mirrors of modernity when they handle the more typical Hollywood product.

MR. KUCHARSKY: There was a splendid turn in a Washington drama column recently. It carried a letter from a concerned mother criticizing a neighborhood theater manager for “consistently showing low-grade, morally objectionable, class D movies, and on top of this you introduce a daily matinee. What better way for the coming generation to achieve a complete moral breakdown than from suggestive movies and trashy literature?” The drama columnist commented on the “dollar-conscious, tasteless” operators and managers in the theater business who “would rather show smut than lose a cent at the box-office,” and who “are in a position to do great harm to the young, the stupid, and the impressionable.” Now, since newspapers are widely read by the young and impressionable, one wonders whether perhaps advertising policy ought not also to reflect some of this concern?

DR. BELL: Then you feel that sex exploitation is mainly a matter of front-page and movie section transgression?

DR. HENRY: No. Last Sunday’s paper (The Washington Post, Dec. 4, 1960) ran the first of 12 chapters from the biography of Marilyn Monroe. The four-column title was: “Marilyn’s Monroe Doctrine: Men.” The feature appeared in the Society section. Another feature carried the banner headline: “Will There Be Any Petticoats in Kennedy’s Cabinet?” In the same section (in December) a bathing suit photo of Mrs. Maurine Neuberger, Senator (Dem.) from Oregon, was probably justified by the related news tie-in.

MR. KUCHARSKY: Can we expect an editor of a secular newspaper to reflect a religious or ethical tone higher than that of the general public?

DR. FARRELL: Most editors can see that a breakdown in morality threatens the very survival of our nation. And the editor presumably is enough of a student of history and has enough love for his country to point a warning finger to the lessons of the past. A nation of Bourbons has no chance of survival in the sort of international test facing America today in the cold war. The editor can point to the early days of Russian communism when free love in effect turned the Soviet nation into a huge brothel. The atheistic leaders had to call a halt for national survival. They did this out of no respect for God’s commandments. But even though they would not acknowledge God’s existence, they discovered that certain laws (which we know to be instituted by God) carry punishment for their violation in this world (as well as the next). America’s great heritage is not a secular one. Its foundations did not rest in neutralism as to the existence of God or certain great moral absolutes. The question we and other Western nations seem to be facing is: “For how many generations can a Christian heritage hold a nation back from ruin when that heritage has been compromised or abandoned?”

DR. BELL: Let me state six personal convictions: 1. The exploitation of semi-nudity, or of sex news in general, is a major contributing factor to sex obsession and moral laxity. 2. One has but to look at a daily newspaper or a magazine to realize that Madison Avenue relies heavily on pictures of partially dressed women to attract readers’ attention. This is true when the product for the sale has no relationship to the picture itself. 3. The so-called “beauty contests” are an exploitation of our young women which is a disgrace to the exploiters, the young women who participate, and to the parents who not only permit this exploitation but often urge it on their daughters. 4. Newspaper photographers seem to vie one with another in securing “cheesecake” pictures and where actresses are involved, their agents use these for publicity and to arouse interest. 5. The “pin-up girl” of army days led many young men to worship at the shrine of Venus. 6. The basic danger of the exploitation of and overemphasizing of sex is that it appeals to man’s strongest physical urge.

DR. FARRELL: The relevance of this whole subject to national survival in the cold war period is seen not only in the threat of general internal decay, but in the Soviet use of sex for purposes of espionage. Female slaves to the state exchange sex for secrets. Thus they probe at our weaknesses in every area. But I wonder if many see the relation between this sort of political prostitution and propaganda prostitution being carried on today by the advertising profession in our newspapers, magazines, and elsewhere. “Selling by sex” is used on behalf of just about every conceivable type of product. A giddy imagination indeed is required to see any relationship between product and sex. But one is expected to choose a particular moving and storage service, for example, because he sees a pretty girl climbing from the back of one of its trucks. Apart from wrecking the propaganda business, such a continuous barrage upon the sensitivities of the American citizen (a continuing dance of Salome) is bound to breach the wall of moral resistance. “For as [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 23:7). He loses a sense of discernment and proportion. Continually going over immoral acts in one’s mind prepares one to succumb far more readily as he passes through the hour of temptation. While adultery is condemned in the Ten Commandments, Christ speaks of an adultery of the heart as well as that of the physical act. Yet so intense is the promise of sexual pleasure, that modern man finds the biblical restrictions in this area perhaps the most onerous of all. The prayer of the public to communications media seems to be “Lead us into temptation.” Nothing seems so dated as Joseph’s running from the attentions of Potiphar’s wife.

MR. KUCHARSKY: I think we should be careful inasmuch as an indictment of advertising media can only be related to the press in a limited sense. While newspapers certainly should encourage high standards in advertisements which they are obliged to accept, their power over Madison Avenue is limited and in a very real sense they are at the mercy of what the ads contain.

DR. BELL: We are talking about the overall impact of the emphasis on sex regardless of its manifestation on the front page or in advertising, and our concern is that all these areas will rise to a new awareness of the harm done and to a new ethic.

MR. KUCHARSKY: I just think we ought not to lay all the blame at the feet of the newspaper editors, nor even of the advertising managers of newspapers, when the advertisers leave it to Madison Avenue to get results by whatever appeals are successful. Also, the press must mirror the times if it reports the news. A sex-spangled culture will quite naturally assign a proportionate prominence to sex in the news. None of us thinks that sex items should be placed on the index. Sex remains one of life’s deepest drives.

DR. HENRY: But where are we headed in terms of our inherited morality? How far have we drifted from the Judeo-Christian view of sex? Tell us not only what the statisticians of sex delinquency and decline are saying, but what the champions of morality are saying about sex virtue and its rewards. Just after midnight December 31 in every hospital the first baby of the new year will be born. In the vast majority of cases, the babe will not be born out of wedlock; let’s balance the space given to illegitimate births by telling what pains and pangs this family is spared, and what joys it knows that the deviants are denied. A fiftieth wedding anniversary is an opportunity to dramatize the virtues of monogamous marriage. Let’s report the news—all the news—but let’s not give the forces of hell the initiative in the way we handle it.

MR. KUCHARSKY: I think that newspapers should watch what the law courts and the administrative branches of the local governments are doing in trying to lift the standards of literature other than newspapers. I think city editors ought to keep a close eye on the activities of local groups of citizens for decent literature, and civic clubs and other bodies grappling with this problem and trying to do what they can. Certainly a lot of these groups are springing up over the country. I have noted that newspapers at times will ignore the combined actions of thousands of citizens who are trying to clean up newsstands and at the same time give special treatment and prominence to obscure individuals who represent very small minorities challenging these same citizens in terms of civil rights.

DR. BELL: Speaking of newsstands, yesterday at an airport I noticed that the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of “pocket books” for sale had to do either with the exploitation of sex or violence. The name of one of these books was The Gold-Plated Sewer. That seems to be not only very descriptive but also prophetic of what we can now expect.

DR. HENRY: The attitude of the printing press toward sex morality—and surely one ought to mention radio and television also—has provoked the complaint that the press tends to become a subsidized (through advertising) instrument of conformity to the modern spirit. Let me quote a sentence from a recent address: “The modern means of communication, linked to business, have become the nerve-system of a decadent civilization.” This sounds like the ranting of a Communist leader at a Party meeting, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t. In fact, it was the protest of a clergyman highly sympathetic to free enterprise.

DR. BELL: I make this observation speaking neither from the standpoint of ignorance nor of prudishness. I practiced surgery for 40 years; in the later years a great deal of my work was in the field of gynecology and gynecological surgery. The danger of repeated emphasis on sex is that it distorts human values by keeping the mind titillated by an ever-recurring reference to what should be a high and holy relationship, and dragging it down to the gutter. The Ten Commandments constitute God’s moral law; it is still valid, it has never been rescinded. The seventh commandment says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Our Lord referred specifically to this commandment and expounded its meaning to include the lustful thought and look. Today the press panders in many ways to a violation of this God-ordained and Christ-sealed law of personal purity. We may appear temporarily to be getting away with it, but as the Bible says, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.” We in America are certainly sowing to the flesh and already we see the harvest upon us. In all of this the press has a guilty share.

DR. FARRELL: What constitutes news? Must newspapers feel a responsibility to present readers with every sexual misdemeanor which occurs? Or just those of famous people? How detailed should these accounts be? And how prominently displayed in the newspapers?

DR. BELL: Let me just inject right here that for many years the New York Times has had a slogan which has deep implications: “All the news that’s fit to print.” Unquestionably, there is news that is not fit to print.

DR. FARRELL: I think we should distinguish the newspaper from certain other mediums. It is a public medium in the way movies, for example, are not. Of course, newspapers use this objectionable movie advertising, and the movies in that way get into the papers. But newspapers saturate our public. Practically every household feels obliged to take a newspaper. They are pretty much a necessity in a way that movies are not. So they have easy access to the hearts of the citizens, and thus, I think, should be much more circumspect. All public mediums ought at least to match standards of public conscience by voluntary self-censorship. This sort of censorship exists always—as does coercive censorship when the former type fails. Their existence is not in question, but rather where they draw the line. Newspapers, generally speaking, have not sunk to the level of some magazines.

MR. KUCHARSKY: Should we just gloss over those who argue that freedom of the press is a basic right—and that criticism of the type we are making is promotive of censorship (even if self-imposed) and the press then is no longer free?

DR. HENRY: Their first premise is wholly true: freedom of the press is a right to be protected: But freedom is itself a moral entity; once it goes amoral, liberty gets lost in license. And it is license that leads to the demand for censorship, both external and internal. Rights and responsibilities always go together. A press that wants to hide its duties soon destroys the very base supportive of its freedom also. Yet if Christian leaders are really friends of the press, and not mere critics, we should be as concerned about rights as about obligations. The license of a minority is often made the ground of a move to censor the majority. Not every pressure brought upon the press, even by ecclesiastical groups, is a good thing. What we need is a dedicated freedom, not merely a reactionary compromise, and on the whole I think we can be thankful that this survives on the American scene.

MR. KUCHARSKY: Some newspapers fall under more criticism than others in this realm and some have more liberal policies than others. But I think it is important that each newspaper have a well-defined policy in regard to the handling of sex news. They should think it out for themselves, and be prepared to give a statement of the standards that they follow in treating this sort of news.

DR. BELL: This should not be considered as an imposed censorship, either by the Church or by groups of individual Christians, or even by concerned people having no church relationship. Rather, what can be printed, and how news can be exploited for something other than the news itself, is a question of common decency. It is possible to write up a sordid story in such a way that the reader will feel revulsion over what he reads; or that same story can be written so as to make evil attractive—and that is what we deplore.

DR. HENRY: We agree that freedom of the press, even in the American tradition, does not mean immunity from legal responsibility; nor does it mean the absence of moral responsibility; nor does it mean liberty of obscenity. It is easy to overstate the situation, however. Happily, we do not really have an “obscene” news press in America today. There is a tendency, perhaps widening, for the press to cater to the climate of indecency and immorality through a commercial exploitation of sex. Books and magazines have deteriorated noticeably more than newspapers.

IS THEOLOGY ‘MAKING SENSE’ ON RELIGIOUS RADIO?

We have stayed with NBC radio network’s Sunday morning “Theology Today” series (8:15 a.m., EST), scheduled 18 weeks through April 30. The broadcasts, arranged in cooperation with the National Council of Churches, are designed to “highlight major questions or areas of concern in contemporary religious thought.” We hope our readers will give the series a try.

I Believe …

In twentieth century Christianity the Holy Spirit is still a displaced person. Liberal theology exiled this divine person from the life of the Church in favor of simply a divine “function.” Recently a distinguished theologian told me: “When Christianity lost the Holy Spirit as the divine person who leads into all truth, the Spirit was soon misunderstood (by idealistic philosophy) only as Mind, indeed as human mind. The ability of distinguishing spirits was lost.” How right he was. Whenever the Church makes the Spirit of God a refugee, the Church—not the Spirit—becomes the vagabond.

The programs provide first-hand insights into some newer currents of thought. They probably fail to make speculative intricacies intelligible to the man in the street, who although swiftly gripped by the simplicity of Jesus and Paul, is confounded by the gnosis of a Bultmann or Tillich. Our impression at this stage is that the general public isn’t much interested in technical, philosophical jargon, even if it is spoon-fed. Despite professional emphasis on “communication,” and complaints that sacred broadcasts often reach only the initiates while missing the masses, the intellectuals unwittingly seem to reinforce the popular notion that theologians and clergymen today talk mainly to themselves.

When the unchurched, moreover, are told that the resurrection and ascension of Christ are not historical events, but are to be grasped subjectively in the dimension of poetry or music—which is one of the prevalent notions today—we may expect two reactions. If the hearer understands what he hears, he may well be tempted to dial to the local good music station. If he doesn’t, chances are he has switched there already.

TEMPTATION IN THE MINISTRY AND THE MISUSE OF MONEY

“Easy-money fever” is an affliction that threatens the pastor and those laymen who assist in handling church funds, thinks P. D. Browne, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Religion in Baylor University, Texas.

One early symptom of this contagion, he observes, is the hiring of staff members not really needed, purchase of more materials and supplies than needed, and larger payment for them than necessary in a competitive market. Next comes the long distance telephone call and telegram when a letter or postal might have served as effectively. Then there is the matter of letting the church pay for personal telephone calls, postage, and telegrams, even for arranging revival meetings from which he may receive love offerings.

“As the pastor’s salary grows larger in a big church situation, his allowances and reimbursements for conventions, car expense, travel, and miscellaneous items, house rent, and love offerings increase,” Professor Browne comments. “He has been preaching the giving of the tithe and of sacrificial love offerings, but ten per cent of all his income runs into sums of money which he doesn’t hesitate to pledge but sometimes fails to pay. Some rationalize that they are the Lord’s men using the Lord’s money in the Lord’s work—which balances their personal financial obligations and responsibilities. Laymen who come to know these situations react differently: to some the undisciplined preached is a clever one; others overlook the matter as another example of human frailty; and a few label such pastors as presumptuous thieves.”

“Evidences of affluence and grandeur in so-called spiritual leaders,” Mr. Browne adds, “create more envy and uneasiness than spiritual communication. And what is a proper attitude toward pastors and denominational leaders who, while enjoying the best in income, housing, food, clothing, insurance, cars, and travel, regularly pressure many poor church members to give sacrificially to special fund raising campaigns and recurrent budget drives?”

These are hard-hitting words but do they not strike at a real cancer, often undiagnosed, which may sap vitality from the Church? The pastor too—indeed, even more than the flock, since he is to lead by example as well as preaching—is called to deny self, to take up his cross daily, and to follow Christ.

FREEDOM AND BONDAGE: COLD WAR ON THE PERSONAL FRONT

One of the costs of political and religious freedom in the cold war era is the personal limitation put upon the high school graduate by the military draft. What may have been for the father only a remotely possible vocational choice, now becomes for the son an enforced “choice,” if only for a few years. Love of country is no different from other loves in that it makes certain demands.

To aid the church youth graduating in June plan his next years, the General Commission on Chaplains and Armed Forces Personnel has released some helpful facts on his military responsibilities.

His chances of being drafted, even apart from a hot war, are very good if he doesn’t enlist first. Some 650,000 young men enter the service each year, about 95,000 by the draft route. The obligation is generally for six years, often two years on active duty and four in the reserves.

But he will not generally be called until he is 22 or 23 years of age. All branches of the service advise college beforehand, the education and added maturity being valued for making a better serviceman. (And happily enough, there are many educational opportunities in the services.)

The young man worried about loss of time is reassured: “… Our military forces are helping to preserve freedom. Your years in the service are not wasted years.… Furthermore, these can be years of physical, mental and spiritual growth—if you seize your opportunities.” This is a big if, and the Commission has further sound advice to meet it: “… You will need to pray often, to read the Word of God, to attend the chapel services, to keep in touch with your loved ones and your home church; but above all, ask God through his Holy Spirit to go with you day by day.”

The counsel is imperative. The temptations involved in military life have taken a heavy toll of youthful morals. The personal tests are big ones. The prize of victory is a rugged spiritual maturity, expressing itself in strong witness for Christ. The risk of defeat: personal enslavement while standing in the cause of freedom.

TRANSITION IN WASHINGTON AND THE NEED OF PRAYER

The retirement of one United States president and the inauguration of another seem in our time to carry more the mood of destiny than in the past. While the flow of events witnesses to the fact that we are still crowded by historical options, rather than faced by the necessities of eternity, an atmosphere of awe today hangs over national and international affairs. It was therefore fitting that Mr. Eisenhower should end his political service to the nation, even as he started it, with a prayer.

In these days the power struggle can easily erase man’s sense of the power of prayer and of true faith, even in the lives of the good and godly. President Eisenhower needed the prayers of the people. He himself prayed, though he seldom talked publicly about prayer or about his religious beliefs. When Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton early one day in 1955 slipped unannounced into the President’s office, he found him on his knees in prayer. Waving aside Seaton’s profuse apology, Mr. Eisenhower said he was praying for divine guidance in a decision that could mean war or peace in the Far East. Mr. Eisenhower invited prayer at the opening of Cabinet meetings. At National Presbyterian Church, after his instruction thrice in the meaning of the Cross and his coming into membership, he was respected as a devout believer. When running the risks of personal diplomacy with Khrushchev at St. David’s, he matter-of-factly said: “It is my custom to attend church on Sunday mornings; I’d be glad to have you accompany me.” Many an American churchgoer has done less with his neighbors. Mr. Khrushchev demurred, on the ground that in Russia (where atheism is the official line) his action would be misunderstood. Had he attended the church service, he might have found a greater than Marx.

Many churchmen will note that Mr. Eisenhower’s farewell prayer, alongside its virtues of simplicity and sincerity, was theologically flaccid by Christian standards. In some respects it was perhaps as nebulous as certain exhortations to faith which simmer down to little more than “faith in faith.” But it also brings into view a problem not yet resolved in American political life. In view of the principle of separation of Church and State, even some churchmen insist that a leader whose private convictions are Christological should formulate only theistic pronouncements in his public life. The danger is that of gliding into a vague theism, and beyond that, into humanism. On the other hand, some quarters today increasingly stress the Christian history of the nation. America can doubtless profit from a sharpening of theological perspectives, even in political affairs. Such a recovery must not, however, involve us in a philosophy of Church and State which our forefathers hoped they had left far behind on European shores.

One order has changed, and another begun. But the season for prayer remains. We join Mr. Eisenhower in bidding President Kennedy “Godspeed.” The perils of misplaced trust in earthly power—the power of weapons of destruction, the power of intellectual or scientific genius, the power (even if shrinking) of American dollars—remain with us. What we need now, as never before, is new vision of the power of God and of regenerate morality in the lives of men. Without it, one nation after the other spends its last days as a heap of rubble.

In such an hour, some were dismayed to observe a symbol like Sinatra and the Hollywood assortment of characters around him looming upon the capital scene, making use of inauguration celebrations, national in intent, for partisan fund-raising purposes. Certain unsavory aspects of American life are amplified quite enough already. Kindred ties are no excuse for blurring the image of the White House, or making it a suburb of Beverly Hills. Let the Sinatras return to Hollywood and, if they must, its manners, mores, and foibles.

But let us stay with the Book. There is more light in any of the versions than all the radiant neon of Hollywood Boulevard.

George Eldon Ladd

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The uniqueness and the scandal of the Christian religion rest in the mediation of revelation through historical events. The Hebrew-Christian faith stands apart from the religions of its environment because it is a historical faith whereas they were religions rooted in mythology or the cycle of nature. The God of Israel was the God of history, or the Geschichtsgott, as German theologians so vividly put it. The Hebrew-Christian faith did not grow out of lofty philosophical speculation or profound mystical experiences. It arose out of the historical experiences of Israel, old and new, in which God made himself known. This fact imparts to the Christian faith a specific content and objectivity which sets it apart from others.

At the same time, this very historical character of revelation raises an acute problem for many thinking men. Plato viewed the realm of time and space as one of flux and change. History by definition involves relativity, particularity, caprice, arbitrariness, whereas revelation must convey the universal, the absolute, the ultimate. History has been called “an abyss in which Christianity has been swallowed up quite against its will.”

Revelatory History. How can the Infinite be known in the finite, the Eternal in the temporal, the Absolute in the relativities of history? From a purely human perspective, this is impossible; but at precisely this point is found perhaps the greatest miracle in the biblical faith. God is the living God, and he, the eternal, the unchangeable, has communicated knowledge of himself through the ebb and flow of historical experience.

The problem is well nigh insoluble for the man who takes his world view from modern philosophies rather than from the Bible. Yet there can be no doubt about the Bible’s claim for the historical character of revelation. This can be seen in the historical character of the Bible itself. From one point of view, the Bible is not so much a book of religion as a book of history. The Bibile is not primarily a collection of the religious ideas of a series of great thinkers. It is not first of all a system of theological concepts, much less of philosophical speculations. Nowhere, for instance, does the Bible try to prove the existence of God; God simply is. His existence is everywhere assumed. Nowhere does the New Testament reflect on the deity of Christ. Christ is God, and yet God is more than Christ. The Father is God, Christ is God, the Holy Spirit is God; and yet God is one, not three. The New Testament does not try to synthesize these diverse elements into a theological whole. This is the legitimate and necessary task of systematic theology.

Neither is the Bible primarily the description of deep mystical experiences of religious geniuses, although it includes profound religious experience. Much of the New Testament is indeed the product of the religious experience of one man—Paul. Yet the focus of Paul’s epistles is not Paul and his experience but the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected and exalted at God’s right hand.

The Bible is first of all the record of the history of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of the twelve tribes of Israel and their settlement in Palestine, of the kingdom of David and his successors, of the fall of the divided kingdom, and of the return of the Jews from Babylon. It resumes its history with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and the establishment and extension of the early Church in the Graeco-Roman world.

Yet history is not recorded for its own sake. History is recorded because it embodies the acts of God. The evangelistic preaching of the early Church did not attempt to demonstrate the superiority of Christian truth over the teachings of pagan philosophers and religious teachers. It did not rest its claim to recognition in a higher ethic or a deeper religious experience. It consisted of a recital of the acts of God.

The bond which holds the Old and New Testaments inseparably together is the bond of revelatory history. Orthodox theology has traditionally underevaluated or at least underemphasized the role of the redemptive acts of God in revelation. The classic essay by B. B. Warfield acknowledges the fact of revelation through the instrumentality of historical deeds but rather completely subordinates revelation in acts to revelation in words.

However, as Carl F. H. Henry has written, “Revelation cannot … be equated simply with the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures; the Bible is a special segment within a larger divine activity of revelation.… Special revelation involves unique historical events of divine deliverance climaxed by the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (Inspiration and Interpretation, J. W. Walvoord, ed.; pp. 254 f.).

The greatest revelatory act of God in the Old Testament was the deliverance of Israel from bondage in Egypt. This was no ordinary event of history, like the events which befell other nations. It was not an achievement of the Israelites. It was not attributed to the genius and skillful leadership of Moses. It was an act of God. “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings” (Exod. 19:4).

This deliverance was not merely an act of God; it was an act through which God made himself known and through which Israel was to know and serve God. “I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage …, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God” (Exod. 6:6–7).

In the later history of Israel, the Exodus is recited again and again as the redemptive act by which God made himself known to his people. Hosea appeals to Israel’s historical redemption and subsequent experiences as evidence for the love of God. “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.… I led them with the cords of compassion, with the bands of love” (Hos. 11:1, 4).

History also reveals God in wrath and judgment. Hosea goes on immediately to say that Israel is about to return to captivity because of her sins. Amos interprets Israel’s impending historical destruction with the words: “Therefore thus I will do to you, O Israel; because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O Israel!” (Amos 4:12). The revelation of God as the judge of his people in historical events is sharply reflected in the designation of Israel’s historical defeat by the Assyrians as the Day of the Lord (Amos 5:18).

Israel’s history is different from all other history. While God is the Lord of all history, in one series of events God has revealed himself as he has nowhere else done. German theologians have coined the useful term Heilsgeschichte to designate this stream of revelatory history. In English, we speak of “redemptive history” or “holy history.” To be sure, God was superintending the course of Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and Persia; but only in the history of Israel had God communicated to men personal knowledge of himself.

The New Testament does not depart from this sense of “holy history.” On the contrary, the recital of God’s historical acts is the substance of Christian proclamation. The earliest semblance of a creedal confession is found in 1 Corinthians 15:3 ff., and it is a recital of events: Christ died, he was buried, he was raised, he appeared. The New Testament evidence for God’s love does not rest on reflection on the nature of God but upon recital. God so loved that he gave (John 3:16). God shows his love for us in that Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). The revelation of God in the redemptive history of Israel finds its full meaning in the historical event of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

One aspect of this holy history must be emphasized. Sometimes the revelatory event assumes a character which the modern secular historian calls unhistorical. The God who reveals himself in redemptive history is both Lord of history and Lord of creation, and he is therefore able not only to shape the course of ordinary historical events but to act directly in ways which transcend usual historical experience.

The most vivid illustration of this is the resurrection of Christ. From the point of view of scientific historical criticism, the Resurrection cannot be “historical,” for it is an event uncaused by any other historical event, and it is without analogy. With this judgment, the Bible record agrees. God, and God alone, is the cause of the Resurrection. It is therefore causally unrelated to all other events. Furthermore, nothing like it has occurred elsewhere. The resurrection of Christ is not the restoration of a dead man to life but the emergence of a new order of life—resurrection life. If the biblical record is correct, there can be neither “historical” explanation nor analogy of Christ’s resurrection. Therefore its very offense to scientific historical criticism is a kind of negative support for its supernatural character.

The underlying question is a theological one. Is such an alleged supernatural event consistent with the character and objectives of the God who has revealed himself in holy history? Is history as such the measure of all things, or is the living God indeed the Lord of history? The biblical answer to this question is not in doubt. The Lord of history is transcendent over history yet not aloof from history. He is therefore able to bring to pass in time and space events which are genuine events yet which are “supra-historical” in their character. This merely means that the revelation of God is not produced by history but that the Lord of history, who stands above history, acts within history for the redemption of historical creatures. The redemption of history must come from outside of history—from God himself.

While revelation has occurred in history, revelatory history is not bare history. God did not act in history in such a way that historical events were eloquent in and of themselves. The most vivid illustration of this is the death of Christ. Christ died. This is a simple historical fact which can be satisfactorily established by secular historical disciplines. But Christ died for our sins. Christ died showing forth the love of God. These are not “bare” historical facts. The Cross by itself did not speak of love and forgiveness. Proof of this may be found in the experience of those who watched Jesus die. Was any of the witnesses overwhelmed with a sense of the love of God, conscious that he was beholding the awesome spectacle of Atonement being made for the sins of men? Did John, or Mary, or the centurion, or the high priest throw himself in choking joy upon the earth before the cross with the cry, “I never knew how much God loved me!”

Deed-Word Revelation. The historical events are revelatory only when they are accompanied by the revelatory word. Theologians often speak of deed-revelation and word-revelation. This, however, is not an accurate formulation if it suggests two separate modes of revelation. The fact is that God’s word is his deed, and his deed is his word. We would therefore be more accurate if we spoke of the deed-word revelation.

God’s deed is his word. Ezekiel describes the captivity of Judah with the words, “And all the pick of his troops shall fall by the sword, and the survivors shall be scattered to every wind; and you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken” (Ezek. 17:21). Captivity was itself God’s word of judgment to Israel. The event is a word of God.

Yet the event is always accompanied by spoken words, in this case, the spoken words of the prophet Ezekiel. The event is never left to speak for itself, nor are men left to infer whatever conclusions they can draw from the event. The spoken word always accompanies and explains the revelatory character of the event. Therefore, not the deed by itself, but the deed-word is revelation.

This is equally true in the New Testament. Christ died is the deed; Christ died for our sins is the word of interpretation that makes the act revelatory. It was only after the interpretative word was given to the disciples that they came to understand that the death of Christ was revelatory of the love of God.

We must go yet a step further. God’s word not only follows the historical act and gives it a normative interpretation; it often precedes and creates the historical act. The test of whether a prophet speaks the word of the Lord is whether his word comes to pass (Deut. 18:22). For when God speaks something happens. Events occur. “I, the Lord, have spoken; surely this will I do to all this wicked congregation … they shall die” (Num. 14:35). “I the Lord have spoken; it shall come to pass, I will do it” (Ezek. 24:14). “You shall die in peace.… For I have spoken the word, says the Lord” (Jer. 34:5).

The revelatory word may be both spoken and written. Jeremiah both spoke and wrote down the word of the Lord. Both his spoken and written utterance were “the words of the Lord” (Jer. 36:4, 6). It is against this background that the New Testament refers to the Old Testament Scriptures as “the word of God” (John 10:35). It is for this reason that the orthodox theologian is justified, nay, required to recognize the Bible as the word of God.

Revelation has occurred in the unique events of redemptive history. These events were accompanied by the divinely given word of interpretation. The word, both spoken and written, is itself a part of the total event. The Bible is both the record of this redemptive history and the end product of the interpretative word. It is the necessary and normative explanation of the revelatory character of God’s revealing acts, for it is itself included in God’s revelation through the act-word complex which constitutes revelation.

Bibliography: J. G. S. S. Thomson, The Old Testament View of Revelation; P. K. Jewett, Emil Brunner’s Concept of Revelation; “Special Revelation as Historical and Personal,” Revelation and the Bible, Carl F. H. Henry, ed.; Bernard Ramm, Special Revelation and the Word of God.

Professor of Biblical Theology

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, California

- More fromGeorge Eldon Ladd

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POWER—MIRAGE OR REALITY?

Secular power is a reality, not a mirage, but spiritual power proves to be an ever-receding mirage unless it is sought on God’s terms.

The psalmist asserts that power belongs to God, and we can readily accept this affirmation as he is the Sovereign God, the Creator and Preserver of the universe.

However, in His infinite wisdom he has seen fit to place certain power in the hands of men. Civil authority derives its power from God, whether or not the agent of that power recognizes its source.

But in the realm of spiritual endeavor, power is an elusive factor until and unless its divine source is tapped and we become channels through which God himself acts.

Who of us engaged in Christian work has not had the humiliating experience of expending time, energy, and every available human resource on some particular activity only to know within our hearts that the effort has failed?

For the carrying on of Christian work there are a number of assets that are very valuable, provided they are combined with the power by which alone they may be implemented. But in none of them does power reside of itself.

Orthodoxy as faithfulness to revealed truth is a vital part of the Christian witness. But it must never be confused with spiritual power. Something else is necessary.

Organization is important as the Lord’s work ought always to be carried out decently and in order. But neither the size nor the type of ecclesiastical organization guarantees success in the work of God’s kingdom.

Programs occupy a necessary part in the work of the Church, even though the very burden of multiplied schedules for Christian work may carry the seeds of their own failure. There are programs which may excel, and there are others woefully deficient in spiritual content; but all will fail if something vital is missing.

Promotion has come over into the Church from the business world. There is nothing wrong with trying to sell Christ to the unreached, and there is full justification for promoting every legitimate agency and activity of the Church. But we have to remember that it takes more than promotion to reach men effectively for Christ or further their growth in him.

Personality can be a wonderful asset if it is permeated by the winsomeness which comes from the indwelling Christ. But some Christian work has failed miserably because men have tried to sell themselves rather than Christ, to impress others with their own erudition and cleverness rather than make themselves obscure behind the Cross of Calvary.

Meetings are certainly a necessary part of a church’s activities. In the very exercise of public worship, in the groups congregated for study of God’s Word, in the assembling of those interested in a particular phase of the work of the church, there is to be found a part of the machinery which is essential to the on-going of Christ’s kingdom. But meetings in themselves are not the source of power.

Money makes possible the outreach of the Church at home and abroad. God has ordained that those who preach the Gospel shall live by the Gospel. He has ordained that we who bear the name “Christian” shall give as the Lord has blessed for the establishing and maintaining of the many necessary phases of the Church’s work. But how futile is the power of money alone; how useless is it without spiritual power!

Methods also have their legitimate place in Christian work. There are new techniques today which God blesses for preaching the old Gospel. Methods of proven worth can most wisely be substituted for those that have been proven ineffective. But God help any of us who depend on a method rather than on the message itself!

Why is it that these worthwhile assets to Christian work can prove so frustrating in themselves? Why do a combination of these good things often lead to miserable failure?

The answer is simple. They are adjuncts to Christian work. All have a good and legitimate use insofar as they are avenues through which God demonstrates his own sovereign grace and power.

We all are familiar with the words of the prophet Zechariah: “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” Do we not often give intellectual assent to these words, but fail to take them into practical account?

Christian work cannot be successfully carried out aside from the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. For that purpose he came into the world and to that end he requires two things: prayer and faith in God’s revealed truth.

Prayer is absolutely necessary for spiritual power, for it is the spiritual respiration whereby we breathe in God’s holy presence. In his infinite wisdom our prayers release divine power. It is through prayer that the humanly impossible becomes the divine certainty. It is through wrestling with God in prayer that things assume their proper perspective. It is while we pray that God speaks to us and we see his way and walk in it—haltingly perhaps, deeply conscious of our own limitations, but also conscious of his presence and power.

Finally, spiritual power vanishes when we question or distrust the one offensive weapon with which man can wage a successful warfare against Satan—the Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God.

It is a demonstrable fact that the assets for Christian work just mentioned lead to futility unless they are coupled with faith in and use of the Word of God. It is because such faith is often lacking today that much Christian activity resembles the pressure foot of a sewing machine—up and down but never arriving anywhere.

We sense something of the significance of the Holy Spirit in the world in our Lord’s assertion that it was necessary he return to heaven so that he might send the Spirit.

We see the effect of his coming, for at Pentecost ignorant and fearful men were suddenly transformed into bold and powerful witnesses, not because of miraculously acquired intellectual gifts or changed backgrounds but because they were filled with the Spirit of the living God.

As blessed as had been the experiences of these men during the three years with their Lord, they were unfit to be his witnesses until the Holy Spirit empowered them. “But ye shall receive power at the coming of the Holy Spirit upon you, and ye shall be witnesses to me …” was the prediction of a necessary and real experience. This same empowering is necessary today.

For such power we too must tarry in the Jerusalem of his presence. We too must pay the price of complete surrender.

Then, and only then does power cease to be a mirage and become a reality.

L. NELSON BELL

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HEY, DIDDLE

This sermonette, condensed from a long discourse with no loss, is offered for clinical study. It is a sparkling example of relevance, psychological-symbolic depth, and restrained sentiment; it is a tribute to an art which has been so intensively cultivated that it can bloom, as in this case, without any soil whatever. Modern preaching can be airborne.

Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed to see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

From our common heritage of nursery wisdom, no rhyme comes with more compelling relevancy than this charming myth for the space age. Recapture its message, and share in exuberant release from anxiety: Hey, diddle, diddle! Has the steam of modern life dimmed your “diddle?” Consider the affirmations of this verse.

Three profound insights into the human situation are presented: the soaring possibilities of existence; the positive affirmation of existence; and the romantic fulfillment of existence.

First, the transcendent possibilities of existence are expressed in the mythical symbol of the lunar leap. Our space-men first conceived of the possibility of moon travel in the imagery of this verse. Observe that a cow performs the feat. This is not a reference to milk prices, but the cow here is a totem animal, a mother surrogate. We are linked to the cow by milkshakes, hamburgers, and TV. If the moon is in the range of the cow, the cowboy star can shoot there too.

The great challenge of existence brings a positive response from the dog. The little hound finds excitement and merriment in the cow’s achievement. Life can be fun, this mongrel barks. To the merry tune of the cat’s fiddling he bays at the moon.

This musical gaiety introduces the climax: the dish ran away with the spoon. What a romantic ending! The dish and spoon are so evidently made for each other. Silver and china are wedding gifts, symbols of happy domesticity. Put yourself in this place setting; see your initials on the dish and spoon. Then, back to your fiddle with a hey, diddle, diddle!

EUTYCHUS

ON THE FRINGE

In our opinion CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the best Christian publication of our generation and the December 19 issue tops all other issues yet published.

GEORGE FISHER

Co-Editor

The Baptist World News

Birmingham, Ala.

In his article “Seventh-day Adventism” (Dec. 19 issue), Walter R. Martin leads out by stating that this church came “in the wake of the defunct Millerite Movement.” He explains that William Miller, a Baptist minister … predicted Christ’s coming in 1843. Then he states: “When Miller’s calculation was proved false, after a second guess, October 22, 1844, he manfully admitted his error and dissociated himself from the movement.”

How more effectively … dispose of Adventists? Think of it, they blindly go forward to build a church on a foundation that the founder himself repudiated!… But the undebatable, documented record proves Martin’s statement incorrect. On August, 1845 Miller wrote his Apology and Defence, a 36-page pamphlet. I quote: “That I have been mistaken in the time, I freely confess.… With respect to other features of my views, I can see no reason to change my belief.… The prophecies which were to be fulfilled previous to the end, have been so far fulfilled that I find nothing in them to delay the Lord’s coming” (p. 33). That position he maintained till his death. He wrote a letter on April 10, 1849—his last, for he was now almost blind—which reaffirmed his faith: “Lift up your head, be of good cheer, be not faithless but believing. We shall soon see Him for whom we have looked and waited.” He died eights months later.

… I willingly give Mr. Martin credit for his evidently sincere and somewhat extended examination of Seventh-day Adventism during the last few years—I know of no similar examination. That was what led him, and the late Dr. Barnhouse, to go on record that Adventists are Christians, and not a cult—whatever this malodorous term is supposed, precisely, to mean. Consistently, Mr. Martin takes essentially this same position in … your journal. And that, despite the fact he takes issue with certain of our beliefs.

In the same issue you list us with the cults, thus neutralizing the conclusion that Martin and Barnhouse felt that in simple fairness they must reach. I have no concern here to take issue. I have not been appointed to answer every indictment of our theology. I have written in comment only on a grievous historical error. I am not at all concerned whether a Christian leader looks down in righteous condemnation upon me and says “cultist.” Name calling, as you know, has long been a favorite, though sorry, weapon in theological polemics.…

F. D. NICHOL

Editor

Review and Herald

Takoma Park, D. C.

F. D. Nichol attempts to evade the issue under discussion, namely William Miller’s repudiation of the “new” views of those who became the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In fairness to the facts of history, I must differ with Mr. Nichol’s statement that: “… The undebatable, documented record proves Martin’s statement incorrect.”

The sources Nichol quotes do not disprove what I wrote. They only show that Miller remained a believer in Christ’s eventual return. This I never denied. Miller and his followers had contradicted Christ who taught that no one knows “of that day and hour.… Ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.… For in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh” (Matthew 24:36, 42, 44; 25:13).

William Miller, it should be noted, was never a Seventh-day Adventist and stated that he had “no confidence” in the “new theories” which emerged from the shambles of the Millerite movement. Dr. LeRoy Froom, Professor of Historical Theology at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary of Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, in the fourth volume of his masterful series “The Prophetic Faith of our Fathers” (pp. 828–29) succinctly states exactly what Miller’s position was: “Miller was outspokenly opposed to the various new theories that had developed following October 22, 1844, in an endeavor to explain the disappointment. He deplored the call to come out to the churches that had been given, and he never accepted the distinctive positions of the Sabbatarians. The doctrine of the unconscious sleep of the dead and the final destruction of the wicked was not, he maintained, part of the original Millerite position, but was introduced personally by George Storrs and Charles Fitch. He even came to deny the application of the parable in the ‘Midnight Cry’ to the Seventh-month Movement and eventually went so far as to declare unequivocally that the movement was not ‘a fulfillment of prophecy in any sense.’”

Mr. Nichol is a good apologist for his church, but Dr. Froom is recognized as its chief historian. In this case, it is Nichol vs. Froom, or apologetics vs. history; and what I wrote, Dr. Froom has validated from history.

WALTER R. MARTIN

Editor

Religious Research Digest

Livingston, N. J.

I was a missionary in India 1912–1920.… At Saharanpur the Seventh-day Adventists got the names of villagers who were converted and reported them as their converts.

WILLIAM WAIDE

Xenia, Ohio

Adventists fail to identify themselves properly when conducting campaigns.… This year I was deceived to believe I had given to welfare, until I read the literature left with me. Is there any legal procedure that one could take against this?

RICHARD L. POTTER

Lind, Wash.

The article “Jehovah’s Witnesses” [includes] … several inaccurate statements: P. 16, speaking of the Jehovah’s Witnesses: “… Its earlier days are strangely passed by in its more recent literature.” This has been the case in the past. But January 1, 1955 through April 1, 1956 marked the publication of a 31 part series in the cult’s Watchtower magazine. This series is entitled: “Modern History of the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” and it takes the history of the movement from its beginnings in 1870 on to early 1956. In 1959, the book Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose appeared. This book is the first book-sized history of the movement. This 311 page (plus charts) book is based heavily on the series.…

P. 18, “… It must be said that they are rather uneducated.” This statement was once true, and it is possibly to some extent true today. But there is evidence that the Witnesses are dipping more and more into the college and business man’s ranks. The Witnesses have put an increased emphasis on education, although not secular.

EDMOND C. GRUSS

Los Angeles, Calif.

Christian Scientists … regard Science and Health in somewhat the same way that most of your readers probably regard the great historic creeds which undertake to spell out doctrines which they believe to be implicit if not explicit in the Bible—in other words, as an inspired interpretation of Scripture. But the Bible (King James Version) remains central for Christian Scientists.…

Dr. Gerstner quotes part of a sentence from Science and Health which states that Jesus Christ is not God, but he omits the latter part of the sentence, which goes on to describe the Saviour as the Son of God. We obviously differ doctrinally on this important point, but it is only fair that your readers should know that we do believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, showed forth the nature of God in all his works, died on the cross, was resurrected from the tomb “and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).

J. BUROUGHS STOKES

Christian Science

Committee on Publication

Washington, D. C.

I object to … terming the Rosicrucians as a “cult.” This is a philosophical organization and is made up of practically every religious belief in the world. To my present devoutness to Christianity and my solid reliance [on] … the Old-School Presbyterian method of interpreting theology as the Master would so direct His students, I can truthfully say that my conception of God and the mediatorship of Christ was solidified more through the Rosicrucian teachings than had ever occurred or been increased in any church affiliation or sermon.…

M. E. HAYS

Memphis, Tenn.

The most egregious error … alleges that Christ’s only function for Mormons is to guarantee men a resurrection. It is hard to believe that this statement follows serious reading of the Book of Mormon, whose title page announces verification that “Jesus is the Christ” and whose message emphasiszes, “it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23).…

As a dedicated Mormon, I freely accept classification outside the Protestant structure, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims divine revelation adding truths not known to modern Christianity. But to classify Mormonism as a “cult” presents non-Christian connotations. The central act of every Mormon Sunday service is the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, with the revealed prayer to partake in witness that “they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember Him.…” Because Mormons are serious enough to spell out practical ways of achieving this goal, must they consistently be judged by an easy “works preclude spirituality” formula?…

Whatever one may think of Joseph Smith’s revelations, Mormonism does appeal to both mind and soul. Its intellectual success can be demonstrated, for it was essentially untouched by fundamentalistic debate.… It will be adjudged progressive in the nineteenth century and conservative in the twentieth.

RICHARD L. ANDERSON

Speech Dept.

University of California

Berkeley, Calif.

The editorial … raises grave question of the accuracy of judgment of its writer.… The … allegation is that MRA has been supported by some very militant fascists. Names are omitted and the sly inference is that only fascists support it. This is itself a political judgment and has no place in the context of the editorial. It is also designed to create a negative attitude in the reader. And the important fact is omitted that fascists and communists, capitalists and workers, royalty and commoner, Catholic and Protestant, black and white, are finding thru MRA an experience of Christ that unites them all into a world fellowship.

JOHN E. BATTERSON

Chaplain

U. S. Army

A RELIGION OF HOPE

What meaning has all this activity for man in general, for the Christian doctor, for the Church? To man in general it should represent hope. Christianity is a religion of hope. The Christian has life eternal and the prospect of eternity with Jesus and in the presence of God the Father. He hopes to see Jesus soon. He hopes to see loved ones in heaven. He hopes to see his prayers answered. He hopes for the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in his own life, and for a divine work in the lives of other men.

When Christian healing is viewed in relation to the commandments of Christ (to “heal the sick,” Matt. 10:7; Luke 10:8), one sees God bringing light into what may be a very dismal world. The dark areas of life in which dwell those afflicted persons who have medically incurable diseases are not helped by prognoses of hopelessness by either doctor or minister. Consider here the field of epilepsy. It was to the epileptic, the leper, the “woman with the issue of blood,” the mentally ill, the blind, the maimed and deformed, the chronically ill that Jesus came. Most of the illnesses mentioned in the gospel accounts are those which continue today to be considered hopeless. Were Jesus to return today, would he not look at us as he did his disciples and again say “O weak and faithless generation”?

There continue to be new developments in the realm of disease which must be considered. As old diseases become curable by medical means, new strains develop. As man is preserved through childhood or through adulthood, he is faced with the diseases and problems of the age group into which he grows. As physical disease becomes more amenable to therapy, psychological and spiritual illness becomes more prevalent. The means of therapy alone produces its own group of diseases—so-called iatrogenic (doctor produced) diseases. Some drugs may actually prevent health by producing an “unhealthy health,” as by the abuse of tranquilizers. At times the search for the removal of abnormality may result in cessation of the initial disease process by the substitution of a more serious problem than the first.

The Christian discipline of medical practice may require the physician’s re-evaluation of his work in terms which are supra-Hippocratic. There is a sense of eternal purpose in his work. It allows him to accept Christ, and then to find Christ walking beside him in his rounds, and standing beside him in his surgeries. It shows him that his practice has a divine purpose, and that he is not merely saving his patients from one disease so that later on they can develop another disease and die. Christ sends the physician to present Christ to his patients. In this encounter they have the opportunity not only to be saved from disease, but to receive life eternal, which ultimately is the greatest consideration.

To point others to Jesus Christ through his life and work could be considered the true work of the physician, as of any man. When this is perceived, the physician sees that, whatever his skills, he is not the only one engaged in the treatment of disease. He observes the work of the chaplain and minister in a new light. He sees the hospital prayer room or chapel as a vital part of the institution. The doctor so inspired knows the power of prayer in his own life and in the life of his patient. He sees the patient not as an organic physical entity only, but as a psycho-spiritual being who has spiritual as well as mental and physical needs to be met. In an era when many doctors are specializing in single organs, others are considering not only the entire body but the mind and soul in their work. It is not strange to find that the general practitioner and the psychiatrist are leading in this consideration. But it is also true that many surgeons are also giving “the whole man” serious contemplation.

When man becomes ill, even medically “incurably ill,” he may retain hope that through Jesus Christ and through the indwelling Holy Spirit he may receive healing. Such healing is not an end in itself, but simply a wonderful gift of God, an evidence of the ongoing kingdom of God and a part of the “natural history” of salvation.

The patient with “incurable illness” has every justification scripturally in seeking help from the Christian Church and expecting such help to be forthcoming in a positive way. The Christian physician who reads the Bible and sees its truth must surely give Jesus credit for all healing and must point out the necessity for the “prayer of faith” in all illnesses, certainly those believed incurable. When the physician practices this belief he can truly start cooperating with the clergy in total patient care and helping the organized church to evangelize the “sin-sick” world for Jesus. It is the hope of Christian physicians that the Church will continue in its meditation, research, and labor in this powerful working of God’s wonderful Holy Spirit in the realm of his healing power manifested to the afflicted, the suffering, and the dying.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

- More fromWilliam Standish Reed

William L. Hiemstra

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The Christian Church is searching for a true pathway to minister to persons in need without compromising her heritage or neglecting the advances of science. A healthy absorption of some aspects of psychotherapy with pastoral care should produce a type of pastoral counseling that does not neglect God or ignore man. Psychotherapy also can become more therapeutic if it will incorporate some elements of pastoral care.

There are essential differences between psychotherapy and pastoral care. Psychotherapy is the main therapy in psychiatry which is a branch of medical science. The psychotherapist seeks to influence psychically persons suffering from emotional disorder in order to effect a cure or remission of symptoms. He aims to promote physical and psychic health as these two may be interrelated. Psychiatric treatment uses the means of “catharsis, working through, re-education, the bringing about of emotional maturation, reassurance, and encouragement, suggestion, and manipulation of the environment” (George Frankl, “The Dilemma of Psychiatry Today,” Mental Hygiene, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, Oct. 1949, p. 554).

Pastoral care is essentially a ministry of the Word of God to the individual by an ambassador of Jesus Christ. Its aim is to bring people into a right relationship with God through fellowship with Christ and to establish people in that relationship. It hopes that mental health will be an indirect but real secondary benefit consequent upon the achievement of its primary spiritual goal. Pastoral care utilizes the means of the Gospel and prayer to convey a message of forgiveness of sins and encouragement in sanctification.

Another relative difference between psychotherapy and pastoral care is that the former is more concerned with general revelation and empirical science in connection with the person’s relationships to himself and others. Pastoral care is more concerned with special revelation and the person’s relationship to God.

Despite the many differences, there is a close relationship between psychotherapy and pastoral care. Both want to see man in his totality. When psychiatry tries to have a total view of man, it necessarily becomes involved in the area of pastoral care. Sigmund Freud reacted against structural psychology and emphasized the importance of the instinctual in man because he wanted a total view of man. Alfred Adler felt that environmental factors must be considered if man is to be understood in his totality. The emphasis of Carl Jung on the “collective unconscious” and that of Karen Horney on “character structure” indicate the same scientific search for a total view of man. More recently Harry Stack Sullivan has emphasized the significance of interpersonal relationships. If psychiatry is concerned with depth psychology, it must also necessarily consider that which is in the depths of man’s being—his relationship with God. When psychotherapy examines the function of conscience and relates itself to conscious as well as unconscious guilt feelings, it reaches an area of pastoral care even if it does not wish to do so.

Pastoral care is also interested in a ministry to the total person, and when it seeks to do so comes close to the area of psychotherapy. The pastor is called upon to deal with many persons having a variety of problems. He encounters people who have compulsions, conflicts, tensions, and fears which restrict the development of the life of faith. When the pastor attempts to remove these barriers, he comes close to the area of psychotherapy.

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

In addition to the proximity of the two disciplines caused by an operational basis of a total ministry to the whole man, psychotherapy is closely related to pastoral care when consideration is given to the person of the psychotherapist. He is a person with interpersonal relationships, including a negative or positive relationship to God. Despite vehement protestations of objectivity, the therapist cannot free himself from the totality of his personality with its background material of faith or unbelief regarding God. The therapist has a philosophy of life. He is more than a technician even if he does not wish to be more that that. If psychotherapy aims to synthesize the various aspects of life, it necessarily becomes involved in spiritual concerns—which is the territory of pastoral care.

Psychotherapy aims to promote mental and emotional health. However, there is no universal agreement concerning a definition of a healthy person. For Freud health must be related to the norm of the pleasure principle. Adler believed a healthy person to be one who was well-adjusted to the community. Jung spoke about individual self-realization as essential to mental health. The Christian wishes to consider health in relation to a two-world-and-life view in connection with the teaching of Jesus about the more abundant life. On this basis, if psychotherapy is to promote health in the full sense of the term it must share in the purpose of pastoral care, that is, a concern about a right relationship to God. Partial overlapping of the two disciplines is a necessary good and not an evil.

A COMBINATION OF SKILLS

Psychotherapy and pastoral care may be combined in certain instances. Psychotherapy whose chief aim is to promote mental health should be concerned about the restoration of a right relationship to God. On the basis of the doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers, the exercise of pastoral care may be the privilege and duty of a Christian therapist. If a client were to ask in sincerity and without clever subterfuge, “What must I do in order to have eternal life?” the psychiatrist ought not to feel obliged to reply, “That is out of bounds for me—I shall arrange for you to see a minister.”

Even as psychotherapy must be concerned about spiritual health, so also must pastoral care be concerned about mental health and utilize the means of psychology and psychiatry in order to achieve maximum spiritual health. In all the necessary overlapping, there must be a close adherence to the primary specific which is unique to each discipline.

The necessity of combining psychotherapy and pastoral care in order to produce evangelical pastoral counseling is indicated by the weakness of the traditional methods of pastoral care. In the latter case pastors were exclusively concerned about the conscious life. There was a lack of understanding of the real needs of the person by giving easy answers which did not meet the need because of the tendency to generalize, dogmatize, and moralize. To illustrate: A teacher comes to complain to her pastor about an unreasonable hostility she has toward two boys in her class. If she is told that her attitude is sinful and that she must repent and resolve not to have such feelings again, the problem will be repressed and the teacher made to feel more guilty than she was before seeking pastoral counsel. By utilizing some psychotherapeutic techniques, the pastor may help the teacher to achieve insight into the perplexing situation and a consequent peace with God as she is helped to discover that she is projecting hostility which she feels toward the minister’s son who jilted her 20 years ago upon two young boys in her class who also happen to be sons of ministers.

The plea for combining psychotherapy with pastoral care does not imply the absence of referral procedures. Pastors are not equipped to treat persons who are suffering from a psychosis, a severe neurosis, or a serious personality disorder. Nonetheless a large number of so-called normal people with problems can be helped by pastoral counseling. One city pastor lists the variety of problems he has encountered in pastoral counseling.

1. Marital problems—threatened divorce or divorce, estrangement, unfaithfulness, adultery.

2. Sex problems—masturbation, perversions, illegitimate sex relations, ignorance, and anxiety.

3. Tensions and conflicts between parents and adolescent children.

4. Inability to find satisfaction in work, inability to find meaning in life, inability to love, insecurity, lack of trust in God, others, and self.

5. Problems of the unmarried.

6. Tensions in work situations—conflicts between employers and employees, people feeling threatened by job insecurity.

7. Theological questions—matters regarding biblical interpretation and prayer, doubts concerning God’s love and his existence. (E. Van der Schoot, Nieuwe Mogelijkheden Voor de Zielszorg, Erven J. Bijleveld, Utrecht, 1955, p. 7.)

Some may object to any combination of psychotherapy and pastoral care. Those who sharply separate the natural and the spiritual would maintain a dualism of these two disciplines. Others may fear that in the process of combination, psychotherapy will become inferior and pastoral care will become secularized. It must be admitted that the latter is a real danger, particularly where the pastors are exclusively concerned about this world and the problems of people here and now. When clergymen have a weak theology or allow psychology to be normative and dominant, pastoral counseling becomes mere humanism with a religious coloring. Pastoral care ought not to be replaced by psychotherapy. Spiritual health must remain its primary concern and psychic or mental health a vital secondary objective.

In combining psychotherapy and pastoral care, the pastor can use several psychotherapeutic techniques in addition to the primary means of the Word of God and prayer. Catharsis is a significant means in psychotherapy. Its use is based on the theory that certain thought processes are inhibited because they are associated with painful emotional experiences. Catharsis results when the experience is recalled into consciousness with the design of expressing the thought and feeling in order to obtain release. Catharsis resembles confession in the disclosure of the inner life and the elimination of resistance. However, catharsis is utilized to achieve emotional or psychic well-being whereas confession wishes to achieve spiritual well-being. In catharsis, the aim is to purge the unconscious: in confession one expresses conscious guilt. In catharsis, the psychotherapist acts on his own authority, but in confession the pastor acts on the authority of God.

Nondirective counseling, client-centered therapy, and directive listening have been caricatured by critics of pastoral counseling. However, it must be recognized that real listening is an essential in pastoral counseling. If a counselor cannot listen, he is powerless to help.

Even though he be wise in knowledge (including learning in biblical wisdom), the pastoral counselor must have sufficient openness and freedom to do the difficult work of listening in order to understand the counselee in his present problem. Only after the counselee has been understood can the counselor confront him with the Gospel which is relevant.

Suggestion is another means which may be employed in pastoral counseling. This technique undoubtedly has been used to excess and without discrimination, but its use in certain instances is legitimate. Suggestion is acceptance without insight—acceptance on the basis of the authority of another person. The pastor must be careful not to substitute his own ideas for the Word of God. He is obliged in his use of suggestion to bind people to Christ and not to “play God” as the authoritarian suggestor. Reassurance has probably been used too soon too often. If the unconscious were autonomous in man, all use of this means would be taboo. While rejecting the autonomy of the unconscious and accepting the existence of unconscious factors, pastoral counselors in specific instances may employ reassurance with profit. Encouragement and persuasion may be regarded as varieties of suggestion which have possibilities of therapeutic benefit when used as adjuncts to other primary means.

Must autosuggestion be contraband in counseling? Christians may with propriety tell themselves what God says about them—that they are new creatures in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17) and that God works all things together for good (Rom. 8:28).

There are two main requirements for successful pastoral care. The pastoral counselor must meet the counselee with the love which Christ gives. This implies respect and patience in interpersonal relationships and a confident hope in that which God can do. The pastoral counselor must also acquire skill for his highly responsible work by a right use of the Bible and prayer, together with a legitimate use of psychotherapeutic techniques. In this integration, God will not be irrelevant nor will human need become inconsequential for this life or for that which is to come.

We Quote:

CHRISTIAN PSYCHIATRY—“It is very common these days to see religion and psychiatry joined together with the conjunction a-n-d. Many articles and books appear under a title of that sort and their authors are concerned to show that religion and psychiatry can and should work together. The conjunction a-n-d suggests that religion and psychiatry supplement each other, that the minister and the doctor both have a part of the remedy for healing the mentally ill. The other conjunction o-r is not so commonly used in this connection. But the idea which it suggests is common, or at least has been. It suggests that psychiatry and religion are mutually hostile.… It is in our Christian hospitals that we have sought to eliminate this hostility. Here we have brought religion and psychiatry together, and we must continue to wed them ever more closely in a bond of meaningful relationship.… Has something been gained now that the doctor concedes that the patient is more than a physical organism and the minister agrees that insanity is more sickness than sin? To answer these questions and to evaluate the new cooperation we must look carefully at their doctrine of man and their concept of religion.… It may be true that a religious standard of values, no matter what that religion is, whether Christian or pagan, can organize a person’s life in such a way that he feels integrated and that his life has a purpose which is satisfying to him.… But when religion and psychiatry are joined together in such a context, with such a concept of religion, then we as Christians are bound to say that psychiatry and religion are allied for a temporary good at the cost of eternal and abiding doom.… For when we speak of religion we cannot and may not avoid the question, which religion?—the true or false religion.… In speaking about the healing miracles of Christ Dr. Paul Tillich says that ‘the healing power of the New Being in Christ, and not the miraculous interference of God in the processes of nature, is the religious significance of the stories.’ According to him, ‘the rapprochement between theology and medicine in our time’ has come about at the cost of biblical supernaturalism; cooperation has been achieved by an accommodation to naturalistic science.… He joins religion and psychiatry, but in doing so he abandons biblical Christianity.… If psychiatry can cooperate with religion only if that religion is not biblical Christianity, then that union is evil from our point of view.… What is left? The answer: two concepts joined together without barrier—Christian Psychiatry.… I am using the term ‘Christian’ in the sense of a large and comprehensive Weltanschauung, a philosophy of life and meaning based on a specific concept of God, man, and the universe. And I insist that psychiatry cannot be a healing science (making man whole) without such concepts.… We are engaged in Christian Psychiatry, not pagan-rooted psychiatry. The person we treat is the image-bearer of God. His functional sickness is related to the sickness of us all: our fundamental alienation from God, our proneness to hate God and our fellowman, the disintegration of the personal self, and the tension of a fallen world of nature and men. We must be more bold, nay, more godly, in applying clinically what we profess creedally.”—THEODORE J. JANSMA, Chaplain-Counselor of the Christian Sanatorium at Wyckoff, New Jersey, in an address delivered at the Fiftieth Anniversary Banquet of Bethesda Hospital, Denver, Colorado, August 24, 1960.

- More fromWilliam L. Hiemstra

William Henry Anderson, Jr.

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Healing by prayer either with or without the use of modern medical science has become a widely accepted part of the modern American religious scene. This is especially true of two sectors of the church which otherwise are rather different. The Pentecostal groups on the basis of a very literal acceptance of Scripture have made healing an integral part of their church life. Some ministers of the Episcopal church in a trend back to Catholic theology have adopted anointing and prayer for the sick as a substitute for the Roman sacrament of unction. Many others, while sympathetic for various reasons to the basic idea, are puzzled about the place of faith healing in both their theological and ecclesiastical system.

The following is a proposed solution. The ideas have their source in John Calvin’s discussions of unction (Institutes I, xvii, 3 and 9; IV, xiv, 1; IV, xiv, 9; IV, iii, 16; IV, xix, 20; IV, xix, 18; IV, xix, 21; Articles of Faith with the Antidote, Article X) and his commentaries on relevant biblical material (Isa. 6:10; 19:22; Jer. 14:19; 17:14; Matt. 9:2; 10:1; John 12:40; Acts 19:6; 1 Cor. 11:30; James 5:13–16). Calvin says that anointing and prayer was a sacrament only of the apostolic Church. The Roman church mutilated the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but Calvin claims to have restored a biblical teaching and practice of these sacraments. Could the same have been the case with unction?

In Protestantism the number of sacraments has been limited to two—Baptism and Holy Communion. This writer realizes the serious nature of a proposal to increase this number. However, after due consideration of material presented below, it has seemed a possible way of developing a theology of healing for pastoral use. The reason for considering the anointing of the sick as a sacrament is that it would seem to fulfill the definition of a sacrament. A sacrament is an ordinance enjoined by our Lord himself, in which a visible element is used as the sign and seal of the reception of a spiritual blessing. In the New Testament we find Jesus sending forth his disciples to anoint in Mark 6:13 as he sent them to baptize in Matthew 28:19, and we find the elders of the church anointing with oil and praying for the sick. The visible element is the oil which in Scripture is a sign of the Holy Spirit. This oil is communicated by the hands of the pastor, and the laying on of hands is a scriptural symbol of the communication of the power of the Holy Spirit. Healing is most assuredly a spiritual blessing for two reasons: first, it comes through the Holy Spirit; and second, it is ordinarily accompanied by a sense of forgiveness. In these two aspects, sacramental healing is similar to sacramental Baptism and the sacramental Lord’s Supper.

The oil no more confers healing apart from faith than the water of Baptism or the bread and wine of Holy Communion confer blessing apart from faith. The communication of God’s pardon of sins through Jesus Christ is integral to healing in Mark 6:12–13 and James 5:13–16, just as forgiveness is basic to baptism and communion. This method of prayer for the sick was a part of the practice of the early Church.

MEETING CURRENT OBJECTIONS

If the Church treats this as a sacrament, many of the objections to current healing practice are answered. First, it is the act of the Church, and not the act of an individual. Individual activities, no matter how well-intentioned and biblical in nature, are always open to criticism. Secondly, sacramental healing is under the supervision of the Church and ordinarily is done only by the offices of the Church. The sacramental blessings are often communicated directly by God’s Spirit apart from the sacraments, but the Church ordinarily uses the instruments of the sacraments as means of grace to communicate the blessings of Christ. God answers the private prayers of his saints, but healing as a sacrament is an official act of the Church. Thirdly, prayer for healing is properly offered to God the Father, that for the sake of Jesus Christ, the healing power of the Holy Spirit may be communicated to the believer who is ill. This is not only a prayer for healing, but must also be a plea for pardon from sins.

Although there is some variation among Protestants about the definition of a sacrament, there is general agreement about the spiritual blessings issuing from the practice of the sacraments. Most Protestants make faith primary, while the elements, circumstances, and method are secondary. The treatment of healing as a sacrament is logical whether the sacrament is considered as a symbol of the power of God in Christ or as a moral real presence of the supernatural. The practice of healing as sacramental in nature harmonizes with varying views of the nature and importance of a sacrament.

A sacrament of anointing offers the following advantages for those who are interested in utilizing healing as a part of their ministry. The idea of the sacramental nature of healing has a biblical basis. It is done within the framework of the Church as an official act of the Church. It allows a pastor to offer a fuller ministry to his people. If a pastor offers healing as a sacrament, it is only to those who, within the framework of the Church, have professed faith in Christ. The true pastor of a church is not interested in reputation, but in the spiritual blessing of his people. There is no personal glory for the dispenser of sacraments, but Christ sends his Holy Spirit and Christ receives the glory and honor due him.

The material in this study on the healing ministry of the Church reflects the writer’s personal conviction. In some ways it is a synthesis of the Pentecostal and Episcopal viewpoints being both biblical and sacramental, with the catalyst provided by Calvin. The traditional view that there are only two sacraments has massive weight as an objection, but does the Bible restrict us to two sacraments? This writer, being a pastor, feels very strongly that he should offer all the benefits of faith in Christ to his people, and the concept of sacramental healing is a pastor’s method of meeting this need.

Miracle

God does not change the courses of the stars,

To satisfy man’s whim;

Nor will He chart a pathway through the sky

Up which to climb to Him.

He views man’s frantic foraging in space

With condescending eye,

And, with the majesty of tolerance,

Permits the brave to try.

But when on earth one contrite spirit bows,

Acknowledging His grace,

God sweeps the stars aside and, with one move,

Sublimely cancels space.

The heavens may continue to evade

Man’s scientific art;

But faith in Christ, at any moment, will

Bring heaven to the heart.

HELEN FRAZEE-BOWER

- More fromWilliam Henry Anderson, Jr.

Asa Zadel Hall

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Not far from where I am writing there is an up-to-date Presbyterian hospital. In the adjoining parking-lot is a long line of doctors’ cars each with a caduceus—the common emblem of the physician. Atop the tower of a not-distant Presbyterian church is a cross, the recognized emblem of Christianity. The cross and caduceus are seen in open alliance.

Within a mile of my residence stands a church of another major Protestant body which supports no local hospital but maintains a tepid and innocuous interest in the ministry of healing by sharing in the support of a hospital chaplain.

Within a wider radius one of the newer denominations has a church. It teaches that the prayer of faith is all that is required for complete healing and definitely opposes the employment of doctors and drugs.

The three examples indicate that evangelical Christianity presents no unified and consistent answer to the problems of healing.

RECONCILIATION AND HEALING

Does Christianity need to reappraise and to restate the relationship between the gospel of reconciliation and the gospel of healing? Without softening the Gospel’s “joyful sound which conquers sinners and comforts saints,” should we not be able to suggest a message of healing to augment the church’s spiritual witness?

When Jesus commissioned the twelve, the record says, “he sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick” (Luke 9:2). There are those, of course, who claim that this was a special commission to preach and heal in order to meet an emergency. If so, when was the commission revoked? Could the commission be half revoked and half retained?

To be sure, when given, the commission meant something different from what it means today. In Jesus’ day there were no hospitals, no medical specialists, no trained nurses, no clinics, no laboratories. Christ’s field of service might be likened to that of Schweitzer in Africa or Grenfell in Labrador where the only hope of the sick has been to get in touch with the missionary. Undoubtedly Schweitzer and Grenfell were moved by the need in these far-away fields much as Jesus was moved by the needy multitudes of his day. Even today in America, despite our many facilities to care for the sick, there remains an appalling need for a healing ministry. To meet this need the faith-healers and Science cultists broadcast the alluring message that God will heal everybody who has the right attitude of heart and mind.

FAITH THE ONLY CRITERION?

The Bible gives numerous examples of men in dire need who possessed faith and prayer and consecration but failed to be healed. Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” is, of course, a classic example (2 Cor. 12:7). But we must not forget Timothy’s stomach trouble (1 Tim. 5:23) and Trophimus, left sick at Miletus, (2 Tim. 4:20), and Epaphroditus, Paul’s “fellow-soldier,” who was “nigh unto death” (Phil. 2:25–27). Why was it that Paul could heal the demented slave girl at Philippi, the lame man at Lystra, Eutychus, the young man who fell out of a third-story window, and yet did nothing toward healing these others?

Was he empowered just on special occasions? Was he enthused with a sort of divine frenzy or ecstasy when he performed these miracles, like Samson when the “Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him” (Judges 14:8)? Was Paul at other times as powerless as Samson when his locks were shorn? We know that the disciples, being men, were not always able to remain at the spiritual pitch of the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:4–9). But to think that the power of healing appeared and disappeared without rhyme or reason in a man like Paul would force the conclusion that our God is capricious. At times he would seem to hear Paul’s prayer for healing, while at other times he would be deaf to all entreaty.

Some other factor must condition the problem of healing. We cannot support healers who state, “It is a mistake to teach anyone that God ever wills us to suffer,” or “I believe and know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is the perfect will of God to heal you from every affliction of your body,” or “Why should the child of Infinite Perfection ever be ill?” Without impugning their integrity or questioning their motives, (although some evidence of misrepresentation is available), we point to the failure of these healers to cure all cases brought to them as sufficient evidence that their claims are unjustified.

It is true that on many occasions Jesus rebuked his disciples for lack of faith (see Matt. 17:20; 6:30; 14:31) and such rebuke is merited today. But we have also seen that Paul’s inability to heal all cases cannot be attributed to lack of faith. Nor can it be so interpreted in the lives of later Christians such as David Brainerd, who died of tuberculosis while evangelizing the Indians, or David Livingstone whose great heart was buried under a tree in darkest Africa, or Adoniram Judson who gave his life for the Burmese.

But note the elements that entered into one of Jesus’ own miracles of healing. In Matthew 9:2, 5, 6, we have some significant statements about the healing of the palsied (really paralytic) man: “And Jesus, seeing their faith, said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.” Two factors enter into this miracle of healing: one, “seeing their faith.” It was the man’s friends who had exhibited faith. No mention is made that the patient himself had any faith. This element of individual faith is often exaggerated while other considerations are ignored.

DISCLOSING THE SAVIOUR

The second element is, “thy sins be forgiven thee.” What did the act of forgiving have to do with the healing? Was it just an additional exhibition of Christ’s power—an extra thrill for the gaping, curious crowd? Scarcely. Jesus wished to give this paralytic a clean slate. He started from the inside and worked out. Spiritual healing was absolutely necessary to the man’s complete well-being. His body might have been healed, might have become a perfect instrument, but an instrument for what? Mind and body might have become instruments of destruction. He had to be cleansed and made fit for the Master’s use.

In exploring the reasons for healing we have now come out to the main road, the highway of salvation. Here we encounter Christians who claim that bodily healing is a part of God’s plan of salvation. They teach that the Atonement provides for everything. Undoubtedly when God enters human life, he cleanses and purifies and ennobles every part of that life. To men like Harry Monroe and Jim Goodheart, whose bodies had been besotted and depraved, Christ brought a glorious transformation. But does conversion imply that after accepting Christ, these men never had an ache or pain or a skipping heartbeat? Did Fanny Crosby and Helen Keller and George Matheson have their sight restored because they were exemplary Christians. Did Paul get rid of his thorn?

The healing of the lame man makes plain the primacy of spiritual healing. The man’s soul was first cleansed, then the body. The order has never been changed. The Christian is God’s exhibit of what his transforming power can do for a sinful man.

Like Paul, he may be called upon to glory in his infirmities. Three times in one chapter Paul emphasizes this fact (2 Cor. 12:5, 9, 10). Paul might have permitted his physical handicap to interrupt his work as a missionary. Perhaps he told himself, “Nobody will believe me when I tell of God’s limitless mercy and goodness unless I exhibit perfect healing and soundness before their eyes. Unless God heals me I shall be unable to preach another sermon or heal another sick person.” But Paul is able to hear Christ say to him, “My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Out of his humiliation he could cry, “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14).

DISPLAYING CHRIST TO THE WORLD

Surely the concept of the Christian as a gazing-stock is not unfamiliar to any student of the Word (Heb. 10:33). As Jeremiah was called upon to sink in the dungeon’s mire rather than retract his prophecy, and as Ezekiel was called upon to eat barley cakes mingled with manure as an exhibit of what would come to Israel in captivity, and as Hosea was required to live with his faithless wife to exhibit to Israel the damning influence of faithlessness, so God uses trials and sufferings of his servants to exhibit his truth to the unbelieving world.

Let’s get things in true perspective. Bodily healing is not the main objective of the Church. The main purpose of the Church is to represent Christ to the world, to exhibit his love and pardon and forbearance. When this can be done best by a broken body, let it be done that way. But for the most part, we believe, God is best revealed in a sound mind and body. Christ still qualifies as the Great Physician, the physician of souls as well as bodies. To sin-sick, harried, and disease-ridden suppliants he reaches out a healing hand as to the leper of old saying, “I will; be thou made clean” (Matt. 8:3). What the cleansing means will vary in different lives. We can exhibit to the world what manner of men Christ wishes his representatives to be. It is for us to bring to the world an exhibit of the whole Gospel, the salvation of spirit, mind, and body.

PROGRAM FOR THE CHURCH

To do this we must utilize all God-given resources:

1. The Church should respond to a fresh and compelling call to prayer. The words of James are still pertinent: “The prayer of faith shall save the sick.” Not always will their bodies be saved, but spiritual healing is always possible. If prayer always healed sick bodies, sickness and old age and death could have no effect upon a person professing faith in Christ.

2. Christians should seek a new insight into the laws of health—the normal functioning and relationship of spirit, mind, and body. The Christian must shun mechanistic philosophy and rely on God’s presence and power to finish his new creation in our lives.

3. The Church should utilize whatever means are available for bodily healing. James speaks of anointing the body with oil (the Greek says “olive oil”). Olive oil unctions are still used by doctors and hospitals in treating weak infants. The directive by James opens the door to whatever means are serviceable in restoring health, including the skill of the surgeon and physician.

4. Churches should give an opportunity for those who have received healing of spirit, mind, or body to tell about it. Such testimony will strengthen the faith of speakers and listeners.

5. Pastors should conduct classes and seminars to teach sane and true ideas of Christian healing. Workers should equip themselves with comprehensive literature explaining the ministry of healing. Lead the patient to place his hand in the strong hand of the loving Heavenly Father for time and eternity.

6. Contend earnestly for abundant living. This phrase has been so prostituted by realtors peddling a more glamorous house, and by salesmen for swimming pools and soft mattresses and cocktails, that its higher meaning has been obscured. Read Paul’s majestic recital of the Christian’s heritage in Philippians 3:7–14 and in Colossians 2:6, 7, and think of your intended part in this abundant life. Seek more perfect bodily health. Learn how to relax when tired or worried. It is not enough to tell sick people to relax. They should be shown how. While relaxed, learn to drink in God’s wonderful provision of love, joy, peace, forgiveness, and fellowship. Take time for meditation. Picture in your mind the kind of person you would like to be by God’s help, and you will find yourself unconsciously growing toward your ideal.

The cross and caduceus are not separate and inimical, they are interlocked. Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians may well become our prayer: “I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 5:23). The same Apostle also reminds us that, as fellow-Christians, the glorious fulfilment of our salvation, towards which we should constantly be moving, is the attainment of “the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

- More fromAsa Zadel Hall

Virginia F. Matson

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A significant change in the educational climate of our country during the past ten years is the growing preoccupation with the handicapped or exceptional child. Public school leaders have engaged in extensive research and effort to provide specialized education for these children. We are hopeful of facilitating the social adjustment of most of these children and developing their full economic potential.

Out of more than 4 million children born annually in the United States, three per cent, or approximately 120,000, show signs of mental deficiency. The recent trend is to hospitalize only the most severe and inadequate cases, and to encourage families to care for their own children as long as possible. This statistical prediction therefore inescapably faces every facet of society in nearly every community of our land.

Sooner or later the Church is bound to be confronted with her responsibilities for these children and will be asked to relieve some of the sorrow and despair attending a handicapped child. For the Church this challenge is not simply an educational matter; it is also a matter of conscience.

Some may well ask, do church schools have to receive the mentally retarded, with all the costly special teaching facilities they require? And will the expensive effort accomplish any real and lasting spiritual good that can be related to the total gospel outreach?

At first glance, a lot of well-meaning folk will shout “yes.” However, a happy affirmative does not effect a solution to the most difficult and trying problems which education of this type imposes upon the church school and those concerned with its management. Nor will it enlighten those uninformed communicants in the church body who believe all such handicapping is “the result of sin.”

Simply accepting the child into the church community will not guide the pastor in counseling the anxious and sometimes guilt-ridden parents, nor will it show the harassed church school teacher how to teach such a child.

For example, some time ago well-meaning church members introduced into our church community an indigent, mentally deficient family in which four out of seven children were retarded. The family came desultorily and only if members made extra effort to transport them by car. The children were unkempt, at times dirty and repelling. They constantly embarrassed our young church community when visitors were considering making our church their spiritual home. During worship and church school, the children mostly sat apathetically. But one small boy was a real behavior problem. I well remember my own struggle for self-control the night of a Christmas program in which my children were appearing. In the crowded auditorium this child was sitting on his mother’s lap, next to me, and systematically spat all over a new suit I was wearing, covering it with unsightly stains. From time to time his mother shifted him to a new position. A dull and inadequate person, she seemed unable to control him and indifferent to his need of firm discipline. Finally she let him slip from her lap and for the balance of the evening he ran and squealed up and down the church aisles, disrupting the enjoyment of the program for the whole audience. Frankly our church community rather sighed with relief when the family chose for themselves one of the new Pentecostal churches on the fringes of our town.

Ever since, I have asked myself, was my attitude toward this child and family correct? Was there a proper and sensible way to handle this situation? And what if another occasion should arise in which perhaps a severely retarded child of one of our better families might attend our church? What should be our attitude? What might we do in such a situation to be truly effective and useful to Christ? Could such a child be brought to a saving knowledge of our Lord, and admitted to church membership, baptism, and the communion table?

There are no easy answers. But certain understandings are available to workers in the field of educating the mentally handicapped with which the Church should be conversant. For example, 30 years ago it was believed that 80 per cent of all mental handicaps derived from familial or genetic causes. Prior to that, many folk considered the severely handicapped child to be possessed of a demon as the result of some sin of his own or of his parents. Today it is known that less than 20 per cent of all retardates derive their handicap from conditions traceable directly or indirectly to genetic difficulties. The major cause of retardation is due to injury or illness prior to or at birth.

Therefore, it is to be expected that 80 per cent or more of the children in any program for educating the mentally retarded will come from families which are normal and in which they will probably be the only one so afflicted. It is also encouraging to know that, of all retarded children, more than 80 per cent have less than serious afflictions and can probably function well in a church school setting with informal atmosphere and concrete portrayal of lesson materials.

A family with several retardates, such as we knew in our church community, is actually a rarity. The chances are less than one in 10,000 that another family so severely beset with retardation might reappear in our area.

It is the children with organic disorders who are most often going to appear at the door of the church school seeking acceptance: the cerebral palsied, the brain-damaged, the perceptually handicapped, the controlled epileptic, and the aphasic. And they will come from families of average or above average intelligence and ability to make a good spiritual contribution to the church family. The families of these children will have spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of intensive effort, and they will have suffered long periods of anguish, sorrow, and spiritual searching trying to understand why this has happened to them. Often the parents will suffer inward guilt and shame over their child’s condition. They will alternately try to hide his condition on the one hand, and pressure him into being “normal” on the other, thus compounding his mental handicap with emotional and behavior disorders.

THE CHURCH FAMILY

Such a situation clearly presents a spiritual challenge to the entire church community. Often forgotten, until one is oneself a sufferer, is the fact that the Christian life finds its true challenge in victorious living and overcoming power in the face of overwhelming tragedy and even death. Thus it is that the Body of Christ, which is the Church, must supply the spiritual solace to relieve the sorrow and anguish of the parents over a damaged child, and simultaneously develop within that child all the spiritual resources of which all humanity, no matter how handicapped, is capable.

Upon the pastor, of course, will fall the primary responsibility of dealing with and directing such a sensitive situation. For this he must be a spiritually strong, adequate, and vital person with intimate knowledge of the paths that lead through the valley of shadows. He must be able to control his well-intentioned flock and steer them delicately through the maze of conflicting emotions which beset the troubled family of a handicapped child with all its fear of pitying stares or downright rejection. He must be able to lead the parents surely to the illuminating verses of Scripture which will convince them that Christ needs and will use even the sorrow and troubled factors surrounding the life of a handicapped child.

Beyond pastoral leadership in dealing with the family of a retarded child lie the responsibility and carefully disciplined behavior of the church family. The primary concern of all must be full acceptance of the child. Withdrawal, stares, even over-concern, reflect a form of rejection to the overly sensitive family, which prefers the minimum amount of attention drawn to their plight when they are undergoing their initial assimilation into the church family.

These are but beginning steps. Children with organic damage often suffer a multiplicity of handicaps. They may have hearing problems, crippling conditions, and can evidence such unpleasant physical symptoms as drooling, uncontrolled jerking, speech defects, and odd gestures and posturing. They may also demonstrate severe distractibility, short attention span, and disturbing behavior symptoms. Their anguished parents are well aware of this but yet hopefully look to the church as their one haven of understanding and restful acceptance in their total community experience. At first glance it would seem utterly impossible for any church community to provide such an ideal atmosphere. What church school, already quite disorganized by normal restless youngsters, is going to be able also to absorb into its midst so disturbing a factor as an odd-looking, unmanageable, brain-damaged child? And where could one ever hope to find a church family which would not be likely to have one person who would blurt out a mistaken offer of sympathy?

Jesus Christ, however, is the Lord of impossible situations. That is proven by every healing outreach of his hands while upon earth. The leper, the hopelessly blind, the epileptic, and restless children were not turned away by him because the person might be unpleasant to have around. Nor is it ever recorded that he poured out upon such a person or his family any maudlin sympathy. His duty was to reveal the Father, and he went about healing and offering freedom from the bondage of the affliction. “That the works of the Father might be made manifest …” is the clue, not only for the stricken child and his family, but also for each member of the church family as they prepare themselves to accept this little one into their midst. For “making manifest” also means that we, the normal, may see that this child presents a golden opportunity to let the love of Christ flow out from us to him. It is the way God’s creativity will give this child a richer social opportunity and spiritual blessing.

Modern education has proved that even the most difficult brain-damaged or disturbed child can be brought to quietness in a properly arranged setting. And even a novice in special education can do much to bring such a child under control if he or she is innately peaceful and an inwardly mature person. Such children have rare sensitivity to the inner lives of others.

Surrendered Christians can bring healing power into these troubled lives. These children can be taught simple facets of the Christian faith. In a quiet secluded atmosphere, with only a few children at a time, the flannelgraph board and concrete object lesson can be used. Stories and songs will be learned and loved by the youngsters as they come to know about Jesus.

In the work of teaching and helping handicapped children, members of the church group will sooner or later question themselves about certain theological realities. How much can such children ever come to understand about church doctrines or salvation by faith? While facing these concerns, church folk should realize, first of all, that there are wide varieties of retardation. Once terms like “imbecile,” “idiot,” and “moron” were used to designate these differences. But with the passing of the years these terms have become so overloaded with misinformation and misunderstanding that educational thinkers have discarded them. Today all such children, ranging from the helpless residential case at the bottom level ability to the slow learner at the near average levels, are divided into only two groups. One group is designated educable and the other trainable. Clinical psychologists can make subtle distinctions between these two groups and work out many precise formulas for deciding their learning capacities. However, for any church school which would educate these children, certain simple differences between them can be used to illustrate their fundamental learning capacities and teachability.

An educable retardate can grow up to earn a living, marry, raise a family—if his limitations are understood and he isn’t pressed to work beyond his capacities. A trainable child can only look forward to a very sheltered future. However, he can definitely be a socially acceptable being, often humorous, and definitely lovable.

The curious fact that I can attest—after seeing many, many severely retarded children and many with ugly deforming physical handicaps—is that their humanity always shines through. Some have such a positive luminescence and purity of soul, free of all the artificial sophistries, that they work spiritual miracles in the hearts of those around them. It is probably for this reason that so many folk like to work with these children. It makes them feel closer to God.

The differences in the categories of retardates reveal the theological challenge provided by each group. The educable child can undoubtedly be led to make a decision for Christ. He can probably understand that God sent a person in Jesus Christ to reveal his loving nature and to forgive sins. While he may be a bit vague about the depth of sin, he can probably be readied to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour. Educable children can usually fit into regular church school classes and catechism sessions, provided we remember not to expect too much of them. They will thrive on simplicity, graphic illustrations of Bible stories, and object lessons illustrating spiritual truths.

It is the trainable child who will require special educational structuring within the church school, just as he does at home and in the public school. Furthermore, he will require a different moral and theological approach to the problem of his salvation. Because such a child cannot by any power of intellect which he possesses ever make any decision for himself at all, he is certainly inadequate to make the most important decision ever made in any human life—the decision to accept Christ as a personal revelation of the Father-God, a propitiation for sin, and the motivating and creative power operative in his life through the Holy Spirit. But it would seem inconceivable that the Father who loved us enough to send his only begotten Son to make such a sacrificial atonement for our sins would not have provided a way for these stricken lambs to come into his fold.

Pure Religion

No longer need theology be hard.

Comparative religion free from taints

Comes simply on a three-ring binder card,

And paperbacks by highly-rated saints

Are planned to suit the reader’s contemplation

Of topics spanning “Adam” to “Vocation.”

The digests have the Bible on the run.

So easy to consume, they won’t confuse—

Just like a college crib sheet, neatly done—

Which gives me an idea that God could use:

He ought to print a Gospel condensation

For crammers facing His examination.

D. BRUCE LOCKERBIE

- More fromVirginia F. Matson

Addison H. Leitch

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We have noted a move toward a union of enough denominations to make a great Big Church of 18,000,000. This will impress people who are impressed by this sort of thing. In the denomination of which I am a member, we have just passed through an experience of merger and the end is not yet; it makes us a little nervous to think that we have to get all wound up for the same sort of thing again.

My own views on the merger of churches seem to satisfy no one. I suppose I picked up the clue from an old minister friend of mine, Dr. Homer Henderson who had a sizeable church in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and who was at one time big enough in our league to be Moderator of General Assembly. During the merger discussions, he passed a judgment on the excitement as follows: “Union will not be nearly as good as the proponents say nor nearly as bad as the opponents say.” And I think that on the whole his judgment was pretty sound. There are days when it is easy to say “what’s so wonderful about church union?” As one contemplates the possibilities set forward by James Pike and Eugene Blake, one concludes that there lies before us mountains of committee work, mass meetings and speeches, maybe a procession or two, and when it is all over the work of the church will still be done by the thousands of ordinary preachers in ordinary congregations who start out again on a Monday morning hoping to possess their souls and protect their integrity as they walk into their studies and wonder once again if maybe this week they might not be able to say or to live the Word of Life among their people.

I turn aside to give you a quotation but I shall be back. The quotation comes from a book called City of Wrong by Kamel Hussein. The subtitle of the book is A Friday In Jerusalem. The whole book has to do with the black Friday which we have come to call Good Friday, the day on which Christ was crucified. The book gives a general setting for the day in Jerusalem and then takes us into the lives and backgrounds of the Jews, the disciples, and the Romans before, bringing us to the climax of the book at Golgotha. But here is the quotation:

“The throngs made their way to the palace of the Roman governor to demand the blood of the teacher and his disciples. Yet there was not one among them who knew any evil about him, none who sought his death out of belief of personal conviction. Thus was accomplished the greatest of crimes of history, the crime of the condemnation of Christ to crucifixion as one who had denied God, without anybody in Jerusalem knowing who it was who wanted his death nor upon whom the guilt of this foul deed really fell.… Thus was Christ condemned to die on a cross for having denied God! Can anyone thereafter feel the slightest confidence in human wisdom?… The fact that God raised Him to Himself in no way mitigates the iniquity of what was done.”

Let me now say a few things about this quotation and about the book.

1. The book was in its Arabic version awarded the State Prize For Literature in Egypt and was therefore highly acceptable to a Mohammedan government in a Mohammedan land.

2. The author is Dr. (M.D.) Kamel Hussein, a devout Moslim. His Netherland publishers assure us that this is the first book ever written in the world of Islam which makes the cross of Christ an object of thorough and sympathetic study.

3. The quotation is not taken out of context nor even out of the general theme and spirit of the book. Furthermore, the quotation makes clear what lies at the heart of the book, namely, a recognition of the depth and universality of the sin which puts to death the Lord of Life, and the sinlessness of this One who is crucified. Christ is spoken of in the highest possible terms short of full deity, there is no hesitation on matters theistic, supernatural, or spiritual, and the treatment of the ethic of the Sermon On The Mount is absolutely toplevel.

We can return now to the question of church union. How much agreement do churches need to have in order to get together in organic union? Just for fun, on the basis of this book by Dr. Hussein, why not try union with the Mohammedans? We are in agreement on the following items: Monotheism, the depravity of man, the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, the Virgin Birth, the miraculous powers of Christ, the return of Christ to the Father, the historicity of the Gospel narratives, and a slight difference of opinion between fatalism and predestination. We must be careful to emphasize our areas of agreement and minimize, for the sake of unity (and unity is always a good thing) the areas of our disagreement. If we find so many things on which we can agree, would it not be well then to proceed to union and work out the “details” later?

To even speak of such a union seems almost a blasphemy—what about the deity of Christ, for this is of the essence of our belief. What about other “essentials” of our faith? But it seems to me that as soon as we begin to talk about essentials, especially essentials of belief as opposed to essentials of church structure, we have opened up the whole question of church union on a different foundation. What, essentially is a Christian, theologically defined? If theology makes a difference between Christianity and Islam, then it makes a difference, and there is nothing obscurantist about those unfortunate people who want to raise questions about sharpness of theological definition before being satisfied with church union at any level. There are differences and the differences ought to be listened to.

The review is prepared in sequence by Prof. G. C. Berkouwer of Free University, Amsterdam; Dr. Philip E. Hughes, Editor of The Churchman (England); President Addison H. Leitch of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pennsylvania; and Dr. Paul S. Rees, Vice President of World Vision.—ED.

- More fromAddison H. Leitch