Page 5873 – Christianity Today (2024)

EDITORIAL

Labor Day has an interesting history. Some trace its beginnings to the socialist Robert Owen, who claimed May 1, 1833, as the day for the beginning of the millennium. But the first May day or labor day celebration occurred in Paris on May 1, 1889. Most of the countries that observe a labor day do so on May 1. In the Soviet Union it is an official holiday. Canada and the United States have fixed the first Monday in September as Labor Day, and in these countries it is a national holiday in which all classes, not simply workingmen, participate.

Labor Day marks the fact that in civilized countries much of the toil of earlier days has been taken off man’s hands. Children used to sweep chimneys and work in coal mines and mills. Now they have too much time on their hands. Immigrants who came to America thinking its streets were paved with gold found themselves working in sweat shops. Automatic machinery has now taken on much of the burden. The change must be considered in the light of the biblical work ethic.

Scripture tells us that God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden and commanded him “to till it and keep it.” The work was not onerous; tooth and claw were not against him. But with Adam’s fall everything changed. God cursed the ground and had it bring forth thorns and thistles; man was condemned to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Later, when Moses laid down the ten commandments, six days out of seven were given to toilsome work; the seventh was a day of rest. Mankind tended to regard this as a satisfactory arrangement.

Now things are different. More people are demanding shorter work hours, and some are saying that no one should be required to do any work. Some people enjoy work, and many others do not; their attitude depends in part on what they do and whether they took their jobs out of necessity or as a career choice. As heavy toil gives way to technology, heavy leisure takes its place, and plenty of people arrive at the shop or office on Monday morning worn to a frazzle—they may get more rest on their jobs, intentionally or otherwise, than they do on their own time. For the first time we face the need to define work.

The United States has traditionally been thought to uphold the Puritan work ethic, which was based on the belief that men ought to be enterprising, painstaking, frugal, and industrious. Self-help and self-reliance were cardinal virtues. Diligence was urged in many popular proverbs: “An idle man is a burden to himself, to his family, and to the public”; “God gives all things to industry”; “industry and frugality make a poor man rich.” This attitude developed at a time when the American colonists were carving out homes in the wilderness and hard work was essential. And at least in New England, belief in the necessity and dignity of work was intrinsic to a Calvinistic theology that stressed vocation, calling, and stewardship. But in our day conditions have changed, and the popular proverbs of yesteryear have lost their hold.

Contrast eighteenth-century America with the world at large today. In the third world, with a population that doubles every thirty to thirty-five years, multiplied millions of people who want to work have no jobs. Modern medicine has extended the life span, and land has grown scarce. As a result poor nations are getting poorer. God said man would eat bread in the sweat of his face. But for many there is no work to be had, no unoccupied land to till, and no food to eat except that which comes from someone else’s sweat. And there seems to be little hope of any quick reversal for the have-not nations of the world.

Moreover, the technology that has freed men from labor and given them leisure time has bedeviled their children. On the farm the children could see the fruits of their parents’ labors and were themselves intimately involved in the production processes. But now in an urban technological culture most children do not see the fruit of their parents’ labor nor do they have a credible idea of the relation of the work ethic to the food they eat, the style of life they live, the religion they profess.

The Apostle Paul laid down the dictum that “if anyone will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10). How is this to be construed for landless people who can find no work? And what does it mean for those who work only three or four days a week to earn a living? It is apparent that we need an updated and better understanding of the biblical work ethic.

Whatever curse God placed on the earth in which thorns and thistles were to plague men, his purpose was not simply penal. He intended that the labor man would be called upon to perform for survival would be good for him in his lost estate. Therefore work is to be welcomed, not shunned, even though it is arduous. Many of us need to reshape our thinking so that we see work, not as a drag, which indeed it can be, but as a part of our inheritance, a needed discipline, a necessary accompaniment of our humanity. But conditions in modern life require much thought about questions of who should work and who cannot work and should be cared for by those who work.

In the case of people who are unable to work productively because of old age, illness, or disability, Christian concern and compassion require believers to work for the supply of their needs. It is to be supposed that first the children or parents have a responsibility to provide for them and beyond that the larger community. This does not deny the value of insurance plans, which are based on the principle that the majority of the participants will pay for the misfortunes of the minority.

The Apostle Paul’s injunction that those who will not work shall not eat should be a basic part of our thinking on this matter. Enforcement would of course not include the aged or the sick. But it would take in the able-bodied who refuse to work. Welfare provisions for the able-bodied unemployed should include work assignments to prevent their becoming freeloaders and to give them a chance to achieve a sense of personal worth.

The case of those who have earned enough to retire early or who need to labor only a few days a week to support themselves is different. A Christian work ethic should stress the desirability of non-gainful employment for those who have large blocks of time that they do not need to devote to earning a living. Surely Christian early retirees or those who are gainfully employed on a short-week basis should seek out forms of work that will benefit other people and keep themselves well occupied. Churches, hospitals, day-care centers, the Red Cross, and hundreds of other service organizations welcome this kind of help. This can have the subsidiary effect of reducing the (sometimes legitimate) complaint of those in lower income brackets who must work more intensely.

Christians, of all people, should seek work, not try to avoid it, and should regard it as an opportunity to serve God and to fulfill their stewardship responsibilities. Paul said, “Keep away from any brother who is living in idleness … Brethren, do not be weary in well doing” (2 Thess. 3:6, 13).

Noblesse Oblige

The most ancient law code known to historians, the Code of Hammurabi, king of Babylon (c. 1728–1686 B.C.), divided the population into three classes: “gentlemen,” “citizens,” and “slaves.” The gentlemen enjoyed special privileges, but they were also punished more severely for their offenses. The Bible gives us no warrant for accepting permanent, legally imposed class distinctions such as these, which are a familiar feature of so many human societies. But it does emphasize the increased accountability of those who enjoy privileges: our Lord himself observed, “Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required” (Luke 12:48). From the context, we can see that he approves of this attitude.

As candidates vie for high office, they do so in the expectation of securing unusual privileges and powers. Yet hardly a month passes when we do not hear of a man or woman in a position of prominence who has assumed that high office gives immunity from responsibility and even from legal sanctions. And in some cases this assumption evidently holds up.

In a free society where people of varying ability and ambition compete, “gentlemen” are going to rise by securing, through science, business, or politics, unusual wealth and power. To prevent such rising would be to impose the tyranny of enforced mediocrity. But if we permit it, as we do—it is on the existence of “incentive” that much human effort is based—then we should not overlook this insight, anticipated in substance by wise men as far back as Hammurabi: “To whom much is given, of him will much be required.” And let our candidates for office make it clear, by words and by actions, that they intend to be exemplary in obeying laws as well as in writing them and enforcing them on others.

The New Totalitarians?

“The most important Manhattan Projects of the future,” writes Aldous Huxley in the introduction to Brave New World, “will be vast, government sponsored inquiries into what the politicians will call the ‘problem of happiness’—in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude.” In his recently published book The New Totalitarians (Stein and Day, $10), Roland Huntford, Scandinavian correspondent for the Observer (London), shows the frightening extent to which Huxley’s vision has become reality in modern Sweden.

Huntford writes in a calm, dispassionate, almost detached way. This makes the accumulation of facts he presents all the more devastating in its impact. He shows how the people of one major modern nation, supposedly well versed in both the Christian and the democratic traditions, have been trained by a combination of bribery and coercion to “love their servitude.”

The twentieth century has made us all too familiar with the totalitarianism that gains and keeps its power by the ruthless use of the army, the police, prison camps, and, more recently, “mental hospitals.” Social Democratic Sweden uses no terror, but a country can accomplish the same goals just as effectively by bureaucratic regulations.

Take freedom of worship, for example: “As a consequence of redevelopment in Stockholm, the only Catholic church was demolished.” When the congregation collected money to build a new church on another site, “at the last moment the Labor Market Directorate refused permission to start building, on the grounds of economic stringency.… A levy of 25 percent was imposed on all luxury construction, under which the proposed church was judged to fall.… In fact, at the time, all churches had been put on the list of inessential buildings whose construction was banned. ‘We are,’ to quote Mrs. Alva Myrdal, the ecclesiastical minister at the time, ‘dismantling the Church bit by bit. And where necessary we are using economic means to do so.’” When Huntford challenged an ordinary Swede, who saw nothing wrong in the matter, “So, in fact, you approve of closing down churches?,” he got the response, “Yes. But you must understand, it’s not religious persecution, which is what you’re getting at. It’s a matter of simple economics” (The New Totalitarians, pp. 176–178).

In the area of personal freedom for political activity, Professor Bror Rexed, head of the government Directorate of Social Affairs, comments with astonishing frankness: “Social welfare limits political action, because nobody will tolerate a threat to their benefits and the power of the Welfare State” (p. 191). In other words, once the people have come to be, in Rexed’s words, “clients of the State,” they will be afraid to challenge or criticize it for fear of losing the benefits they are led to believe it bestows on them (but for which Swedes paid, in 1968, 40.6 per cent of their GNP in taxes).

In the area of the arts, Huntford comments: “Artists owe most of their bread and butter, and most decorative art owes its existence, to the public authorities” (p. 309). The director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Erland Josephson, stated:

I am against the commercial theater, because it has to live by its profits. The theater must be non-profit-making. I want the commercial theater to close, and let the State take over. The whole thing’s academic anyway, because I think that you’ll find that all private theaters will disappear within ten years. Most of them are scheduled for demolition anyway, and so the whole question has been settled for us by the town planners [pp. 312, 313].

“The drama, says Josephson, must promote the intentions of the government” (p. 310). The prime minister, Olof Palme, himself says, “Marxism makes it possible to see art not only as a product of society, but also as a weapon in the class war, as an instrument for changing society.… So far will I go in confessing a Marxist attitude to life and art” (p. 307).

Huntford describes “progressive,” “democratic” Sweden, then, as a totalitarian state. It wears velvet gloves, to be sure, but it is just as totalitarian in theory, and ultimately in practice, as the Soviet Union.

As our national elections approach, Americans will be well advised to scrutinize the speeches and promises of the parties and candidates to see whether and to what extent they too are promising us new totalitarianism. It would be convenient if we could attach a party label to these tendencies, and say, “Here in America it is the——candidate who theatens us with such velvet-gloved tyranny.” Unfortunately, as Christian thinker Jacques Ellul observes in The Political Illusion, the almost universal development in our century, in every country and all major parties, is in the direction described by Huntford. So our task as Christian citizens is not merely to choose wisely among the candidates, but to challenge candidates and fellow-voters alike to recognize the implications of the course into which we are drifting and to seek an alternative more compatible with the dignity of men and women as responsible individuals called to be children of God.

‘Marjoe’ In The Shadowlands

As Marjoe Gortner, Pentecostal evangelist, stood before them under the banner “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever,” most people at that tent meeting believed what Marjoe preached. They assumed he believed it, too. But when they go to see the film Marjoe, a documentary of his last days milking the revival circuit (see News, page 40), they discover that Marjoe was a cheap fake.

Many film critics exultingly proclaim with New York magazine’s reviewer that Marjoe “gives us an insight into revivalists and evangelicalism that other films have aspired to but never quite achieved. It is ‘now’ and it is always, a perception of hunger and loneliness and of the surcease the opiate provides.” But true evangelical Christianity—as distinguished from the Marjoe imitation—is by no means an “opiate,” another high; it provides life full of harmony and beauty, abundant life. And not all evangelists are Marjoe Gortners. There is a “ring of truth” about committed ministers of the Gospel that the film’s phony evangelist never attains. Gortner’s statement on the “Today” program that “there is no difference between Billy Graham and myself, except for the class of people we preach to,” shows how little he knows of the real thing. Moreover, the counterfeit guarantees the existence of the real. Marjoe, rather than cheapening Christianity, merely cheapens its protagonist, who seems content to exist in night’s shadowlands rather than live in the sunlight of God’s day.

Frisbee Flexibility

A collection plate may have been the first Frisbee. The Official Frisbee Handbook by Goldy Norton, attempting a history of the popular flying discs, traces one (uncertified) theory back to a Yale undergraduate, Elihu Frisbee, who in 1827 rebelled against compulsory chapel and hurled the collection plate across the campus quad.

Try reversing the procedure by using Frisbees to lift an offering at your next church outing. They’d be easier to handle than hats.

Talking Back To The Tv

Television’s two harbingers of fall have arrived: professional football and breathless ballyhoo about the great new season acomin’ on NBC/CBS/ABC. Anyone who believes television commercials about detergents and deodorants does so at his own risk. Anyone who believes television commercials about television is mad. Most of us have been watching it long enough to know that what we can really look forward to is an unimaginative reworking of overworked formulas.

For variety, why not a fast-paced series based on the adventures of a missionary of an unnamed church who goes to an unnamed Middle East nation as an undercover agent for the CIA charged with keeping tabs on the sheikh’s connections with an unnamed Communist world power while avoiding the blandishments of the sheikh’s harem. Script-writers would have a wide open field for all those things Americans love to see on TV: suspense, violence, patriotism, sex, and even a little innocuous religion.

But perhaps that’s going too far. Not even innocuous religion is likely to be given a place in television drama. Real people generally believe something about God. Real people talk—even fight—about religion. But for TV people, religion hasn’t yet been invented.

We suggest that Christians counteract this by theologizing the programs they watch. Raise questions: Does this character believe in God? How can you tell? How would he express it if the writer allowed him to? What difference might it make if the good guy bent on revenge met Jesus and followed his teaching? Or what difference would it make if the bad guy was converted?

If you ask these questions aloud, your family may banish you to the nine-inch black-and-white set upstairs. If you don’t, you and they may be absorbing a set of values antithetical to your faith.

Let Your Yes Be Yes

Christians are supposed to accept certain moral and ethical standards for their personal conduct, and two of these are telling the truth and keeping commitments. We may marshal many rationalizations, and even some cogent reasons, to persuade ourselves that in certain situations we cannot tell the truth or fulfill an obligation. These include the doctrine of “mental reservation” espoused by certain Roman Catholic casuists and the very flexible interpretations of “situation ethics” put forward by Episcopalian Joseph Fletcher and others. All of us probably resort to some such devices at times, though perhaps with an uneasy conscience.

Yet over and over again incidents arise in which it becomes evident that no matter how awkward the truth may have seemed, it would have turned out to be a good deal less awkward than evasion. The Eagleton fiasco is a case in point. Suppose, when questioned by Senator McGovern’s staffers about skeletons in his closet, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton had told them of his hospital record. Perhaps he would have been selected anyway—McGovern said that he would have been—and there would have been no embarrassing exposure afterward. If instead he had been turned down, then he would have been just where he is now as regards his candidacy, and in much better shape as regards peace of mind.

When the news came out, McGovern could certainly have asked Eagleton to step down, for the very adequate reason that Eagleton had been less than candid with a man who was willing to stake on him his own and his nation’s hopes. But McGovern courageously—or quixotically—proclaimed his 1,000 per cent support for Eagleton. As the opposition to Eagleton began to mount, McGovern would probably have preferred to be like the man the psalmist describes, “that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not” (Ps. 15:4), but political prudence dictated that he withdraw this commitment. Many of his admirers, though convinced of the necessity of disavowing Eagleton, felt that it should have been done sooner and more straightforwardly.

Special Notice

There will be a three-week interval between this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and the next. Each summer we interrupt the regular two-week cycle to allow for staff vacations. The next issue will be dated September 15.

On the sidelines, trying desperately hard to be a star but sounding a good deal more like a hyena, was the sensation-hawking columnist Jack Anderson. Journalistic integrity, and an awareness of the tremendous injury false reporting can cause, should certainly have kept him from publicizing unsubstantiated reports about Eagleton’s alleged citations for drunken driving. When brought to the point where he had to admit he had done wrong, Anderson made an ambiguous statement that restored his own honor as little as it did Eagleton’s chances.

We hope the personal embarrassments of this incident will soon be forgotten as the candidates face the major issues of our day. But we must also hope that at least a few people have learned a lesson, and will more faithfully heed the Lord’s admonition, “Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay” (Matt. 5:37).

A Massacre Remembered

August twenty-four is the four-hundredth anniversary of the infamous massacre of French Protestants on the eve of the Feast of St. Bartholomew.

The occasion for the beginning of a program that lasted for nearly six weeks and ultimately led to the murder of thirty thousand or more Huguenots was the marriage of Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV), at that time a Huguenot leader, to Margaret of Valois. Catherine de Médicis, queen mother and the real power behind the throne, was extremely jealous of the influence on the young king Charles IX exerted by Gaspard de Coligny, the admiral of the French fleet and also a Protestant. She seized upon the occasion of his visit to Paris for the wedding to arrange with the powerful Guise family for his assassination. When the attempt aborted, she provoked a bloody attack on the many Huguenot leaders who were in the city for the wedding. The massacre quickly spread throughout the provinces, leaving a trail of blood across France.

This was but one event in the intermittent persecution of French Protestants for more than a century. The culmination came in the 1680s with the extreme measures of Louis XIV, who decreed the destruction of all Protestant churches, the removal of all children from Protestant parents to be raised as Catholics, and other torments. This final period of persecution led to the emigration of nearly half a million Huguenots from France—to the subsequent cultural, religious, and economic deprivation of France, but to the enrichment of the life of England, Germany, Holland, and the Americas.

The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day stands as a vivid reminder not only of the importance of the great doctrines of the Reformation, for which these French Christians were willing to die, but also of the supreme value of the political right of freedom of religious belief. This freedom, which has come to many (but not all) parts of our world only of late, and then at great cost, is extremely fragile and must be constantly guarded.

As a safeguard against smugness, non-Catholics need only recall that what happened on St. Bartholomew’s Day and during the subsequent weeks in 1572 has happened many times in the history of human relations. Pagans have persecuted Christians, and Christians pagans; Protestants have persecuted Roman Catholics, and both have joined forces against Anabaptists and Jews; professing Christians have killed Muslims in the name of the Lord, and Muslims have slaughtered Armenian Christians; and in modern times, atheists in Germany, Russia, and China have put to death literally millions of Jews, Christians, and other “undesirables.”

May each St. Bartholomew’s Day serve to remind all spiritual descendants of those brave French Protestants of their responsibility to stand side by side with other men of good will in the defending of the precious gift of religious freedom—even the freedom to be wrong!

A Mission Field At Your Doorstep?

The Christian and Missionary Alliance calls attention to an alarming decline in the number of candidates for foreign missionary service (The Alliance Witness, July 19, 1972). It seems that the mood of “neo-isolationism,” of preoccupation with domestic problems, that is evident on the political and economic scene in the United States is also beginning to be heavily felt in the religious sphere.

There may have been a tendency in the past for the evangelical church to “export” its concern for its neighbors: instead of taking thought for the unevangelized and distressed neighbor here at home, evangelicals preferred to give money and to send missionaries to the four corners of the earth. But the slogan, “There is a mission field at your doorstep,” like so many other ideas that are valuable for the correction of a problem, may be becoming a problem itself.

A variety of evangelical groups have devoted themselves with laudable zeal to remedying the fact that in our “Christian” America only a minority of people even know what the Gospel is, much less accept it. Key 73 is a result of this zeal. But such a concern, so evident among the Jesus people and in the charismatic movements, must not diminish our view of millions who have not even heard of Jesus Christ.

There may be some justification for the “neo-isolationist” trends in American politics—we will not go into that question—but there is no justification for any kind of spiritual neo-isolationism if it means we lose our willingness to obey the Lord’s Great Commission, “Make disciples of all nations.”

Pass It On

Nothing is free in this world—not even salvation. Everything has its price. Salvation, free to those who accept it, is still the world’s costliest gift. God gave up his Son to death so that we could freely receive what we could neither merit or earn.

Having received this free salvation, we ought to pass it on. It gives us everything and costs us nothing; the least we can do is share it. Moreover, it is one of the few gifts that can be kept when it is given away.

In the Christian churches today there are multiplied numbers of enthusiastic young people and older people who have experienced salvation in Jesus Christ and are passing it on; and there are large numbers of churchgoers who never share the Good News with anyone. For many in the latter group, the Gospel and thus the mission of the Church have become a socio-political, humanistic matter. Witness, for example, the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches, which meets in Bangkok at year’s end. The theme is “Salvation Today.” But preparatory materials thus far have said little about personal regeneration as understood historically. Unless some significant change takes place between now and then, it is highly unlikely that by the end of the meeting the delegates will have anything to pass on to anybody.

At the risk of being called simplistic and reactionary, out of tune with the times, we recommend to all churches and to every individual Christian the sage statement that came out of the meetings of the International Missionary Council at Tambaram, Madras, India in 1938:

The unfinished evangelistic task of the Church is determined by the commission committed by our Lord to His disciples to preach the Gospel to every creature. By evangelism, therefore, we understand that the Church Universal, in all its branches and through the service of all its members, must so present Christ Jesus to the world in the power of the Holy Spirit that men shall come to put their trust in God through Him, accept Him as their Savior, and serve Him as their Lord in the fellowship of His Church.

To those who have never embraced the Gospel we say: Receive it. To those who have it we say: Pass it on.

Righteous Ethnics

Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America, by Martin E. Marty (Dial, 1970, 295 pp., $8.95, $2.95 pb), and The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: The New Political Force of the Seventies, by Michael Novak (Macmillan, 1972, 321 pp., $7.95), are reviewed by Harold O. J. Brown, associate editor ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

When the World Council of Churches leader Eugene Carson Blake says Righteous Empire “ought to be required reading for all American Christians,” the reason is not that Marty has given us a good history of “The Protestant Experience in America.” One looks in vain in his book for an account of revivalism, of the Unitarian Departure, of the variant movements all too characteristic of American spirituality such as Christian Science, Mormonism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Although he is very interested in “the overlooked Protestant,” i.e., the black American, Marty does not give us a cohesive picture of black Protestantism either. Such an important movement as his own Missouri Synod does not even rate mention in the index. And he denigrates fundamentalism.

Why then does Blake, among others, want to make Righteous Empire required reading, and why did it win a National Book Award for 1971? Marty’s book is an attempt to characterize the history of Protestantism in America—its evangelism, missions, education, and all its other aspects—as the self-righteous, self-serving spiritual propaganda machine of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, intended to subjugate the “ethnics,” especially blacks and southern and eastern Europeans. In order to do this, Marty must assimilate non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants—e.g., Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians—to the WASPs, all of whom he lumps together for blanket condemnation.

One of the three judges on the National Book Award Committee was Michael Novak. A perusal of his Unmeltable Ethnics immediately reveals that while his scholarship is broader and deeper than Marty’s, he shares one major cause with him: the denigration of Protestantism, especially “White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism,” as the major force for repression and evil in American society.

Novak writes out of a self-consciously “Slovak” background. To this reviewer, who himself is as East European in ancestry as Novak’s children, namely 50 per cent, it seems that he grossly exaggerates the pathos of growing up Slav. Even his acronym PIGS (Poles-Italians-Greeks-Slavs) is more emotive than apt, since Poles too are Slavs.

Nevertheless, there are many extremely pertinent observations and a great deal of truth in Novak’s book. He does help the reader understand the “blue-collar” syndrome that pitted the American working class, largely made up of Novak’s “unmeltable ethnics,” against what he identifies as an alliance of left-wing intellectual snobs and militant black revolutionaries. He analyzes and excoriates some of the stultifying weaknesses of the American way of life (though perhaps he is wrong in attributing them primarily to WASPishness), such as extreme, anti-social individualism, the loss of family ties, and enchantment by depersonalizing television.

Like Marty, Novak turns all Protestants—Germans, Dutch, or whatever—and even the German Catholics, it seems, into WASPs; he does the same to any “ethnics,” such as Spiro Agnew and Edmund Muskie, whose successes would seem to disprove the theory about the inevitable breaking of an ethnic’s spirit by WASP repression.

Novak’s book is to a great extent a Catholic’s protest against Protestant spiritual domination in American life, which in his opinion has lead us to an unhealthy perfectionism and asceticism; thus he overlooks the very strong other-worldly aspects of Catholicism as well as the hedonism running through America’s history. Of course Novak has few words for the Irish, who will no doubt be surprised to find themselves, except for Robert F. Kennedy, the allies of the WASPs. In short, Novak mars many of his valuable insights by his attempts to force his observations into a predetermined scheme.

Novak goes beyond Marty’s mere condemnation of WASP arrogance and supremacy to concrete proposals for the future. Although he explains how his ethnics have been the hardest hit by liberal projects intended to enforce integration in society and help the black minority, he illogically concludes that the ethnics should align themselves with their “natural allies” the blacks to deal the coup de grace to the domination of the WASPs and their (nonethnic?) allies and henchmen, the Irish.

Whatever merit this may have as a political strategy to win elections, it can only be considered deplorable from a human perspective. It is one thing to urge all ethnic minorities (even the WASPs?) to be proud of their backgrounds and to cultivate their own traditions and cultural distinctives. It is another to urge them to build pressure groups in order to overthrow and subjugate their presumed exploiters of half a century ago.

One can agree with Novak that each of America’s ethnic minorities—including WASPs—can and should make a unique contribution to the richness of her national life, without subscribing to his appeal for a new kind of power politics based on ethnic loyalties and antagonisms. The recent mass murders in Bangladesh and Burundi have shown us all too clearly where that leads.

Varying Perspectives On Paul

Paul: Messenger and Exile, by John J. Gunther (Judson, 1972, 190 pp., $6.95), The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul, by David L. Dungan (Fortress, 1971, 180 pp., $6.95), and Perspectives on Paul, by Ernst Käsemann (Fortress, 1971, 173 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by George E. Cannon, associate professor of New Testament, Bethel Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota.

The major challenge in understanding the letters of Paul is learning enough about the historical and religious background to attempt to recreate the situation of his readers to which Paul addressed himself. Here are three books to help us in this task.

Dr. Gunther’s approach in Paul: Messenger and Exile is primarily chronological and biographical. I was impressed with his knowledge of Roman history, textual criticism, and the major issues related to the authorship and unity of the Pauline letters. However, I was surprised at his uncritical use of Acts as a primary source for Paul’s life and chronology without any explanation. Surely he must know that many New Testament scholars would consider this illegitimate. Although it is refreshing to see Acts taken seriously, Gunther owes his readers a substantial chapter defending his use of Acts and the Pastoral Epistles.

There are a number of surprises to be found in a work that so uncritically follows Acts. Gunther believes Galations was written to the churches in South Galatia that Paul founded on his first missionary journey. He thinks Galatians 2:1–10 refers not to the Acts 15 council visit but to the “famine visit” described in Acts 11:27–30. One would expect him, therefore, to date Galatians before the Acts 15 council (and thus account for why Paul does not quote the decision of the council), which would have been so pertinent to the issue of circumcision in Galatians. But Gunther dates Galatians five years after the council. He also feels that Paul compromised himself over the issue of circumcision, and that he even permitted Titus to be circumcised in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:3 ff. interpreted in the light of a textual difference)!

Gunther regards Second Corinthians, Philippians, and Romans as composite documents. He thinks the Pastoral Epistles contain some genuine Pauline fragments taken from letters Paul wrote while imprisoned in Caesarea and Rome. He also believes that the captivity letters (Philemon, Colossians, and Philippians 1–3) were written during Paul’s Caesarean imprisonment. Ephesians, he guesses, was written by Timothy and was not intended to be a circular letter. Hebrews was written by Apollos from Corinth to the church at Ephesus.

The hypothesis that Paul was released from prison at Rome and was later imprisoned there a second time is usually based on the Pastoral Epistles. Gunther rejects the Pastorals as the direct product of Paul or an amanuensis but posits an exile to Spain between two Roman imprisonments.

Gunther’s originality is impressive, but his methodology, vast amount of speculation, and inordinately long paragraphs are disappointing.

In The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul, Dr. Dungan takes a literary critical approach, skillfully using the tools of form and redaction criticism. The debate over the relation of Paul to Jesus has continued for many decades. The Bultmannian school asserts that the teachings of the historical Jesus were of practically no concern to Paul. Dungan raises the issue again and concludes that Paul knew well the traditional sayings of Jesus and took them seriously—even more seriously than the writers of the Synoptic Gospels.

Dungan’s method of studying the relation of Paul to the sayings of Jesus is impressive. He compares three sets of evidence: (1) Paul’s application of the sayings of the Lord to the situations in his churches, (2) the early Church’s use of the various sayings of Jesus to guide its own life (these are reconstructed form-critically out of the Synoptic Gospels), and (3) the use to which the Synoptic writers themselves put the sayings (derived through redaction criticism).

He chose two legal sayings for study: the Lord’s command about support for apostles (1 Cor. 9:4 ff.) and his prohibition of divorce (1 Cor. 7:10 ff.). To the former he compares the mission instructions in the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 10:1–16; Marie 6:7–11; Luke 9:1–5; Luke 10:1–12), and to the latter he compares the sayings on divorce in Matthew 19:9 ff. and Mark 10:11 ff. In both cases Dungan points out how a remarkable similarity between the ways in which Paul and the Synoptic writers cite and apply the commands of the Lord. They all know the traditional sayings of the Lord; they treat them seriously and with respect; but they exercise freedom in applying the sayings to situations in the churches.

I disagree with Dungan’s belief that Paul’s primary opponents in Corinth were Peter and the brothers of the Lord and that Paul viewed marriage as “a necessary evil due to the weakness of the flesh.” But these matters have little to do with the purpose of the book. Also interesting but not essential to his point is Dungan’s analysis of the Synoptic materials, which offers grounds for questioning the established two-document hypothesis and the priority of Mark.

For a book dealing with such technical matters, Sayings is extremely lucid and well written. Dungan has made a major contribution to Pauline research.

Dr. Käsemann’s book, Perspectives on Paul, is a collection of lectures and articles on aspects of Paul’s theology, prepared between 1964 and 1967. His approach, like Bultmann’s, is anthropological and existential, though he differs sharply with his former teacher on many points.

This divergence readily can be seen in his first chapter, “On Paul’s Anthropology.” Käsemann agrees with Bultmann that Paul stresses the importance of the individual. But he perceptively disagrees with Bultmann’s conviction that the anthropological and soteriological orientation of Paul’s theology can best be treated in a doctrine of man. Such a view makes man fundamentally separable from the rest of the world. On the contrary, says Käsemann, man is himself only in his particular world and is always set in a structure of solidarity. But the world is always a sphere of sovereignty, and man is the creature who “radically and representatively for all others submits to his Lord, becoming the instrument by which he manifests his power and his universal claim.”

All the chapters show insight and impressive exegesis. I found “The Motif of the Body of Christ” and “The Spirit and the Letter” especially helpful. To those with the patience to work through Käsemann’s labored thought I promise that, while they may not always agree with him, they will find the book a fertile source of exciting ideas.

Newly Published

Moses, the Servant of Yahweh, by Dewey Beegle (Eerdmans, 368 pp., $7.95). A major biography of one of the most important men in world history. Beegle works within the framework of the prevailing critical views, but constructively. He supplies considerable information of value to advanced students and preachers of varying persuasions.

Toward a Discipline of Social Ethics: Essays in Honor of Walter George Muelder, edited by Paul Deats, Jr. (Boston University, 328 pp., $10). Notable in this collection is candidate George S. McGovern’s essay in which he gives his own Christian view of participation, saying: “The true believer is always a greater threat in politics than either the cynical realist or the naïve idealist.” The essays are short on biblical content; essays 5–8 deal with power, coercion, social strategy, and economic justice.

Religious Liberty in the United States: The Development of Church-State Thought Since the Revolutionary Era, by Elwyn Smith (Fortress, 386 pp., $10.95). A major study, examining the separatist, Catholic, and constitutional traditions as they have evolved over the centuries. Especially important as background to the continuing debates.

Somebody Please Love Me: A Message to Parents About Your Teenager and Drugs, by Al Palmquist and Frank Reynolds (Bethany Fellowship, 102 pp., $.75 pb). Today’s parents can’t read too much on this regrettably vital topic. The authors have had plenty of experience with drug users.

The Arab Israeli Struggle, by Charles Pfeiffer (Baker, 112 pp., $.95 pb). A fairly even-handed account of the Palestinian conflict of this century by a noted evangelical Bible scholar. The author defends the right of Israel to exist, but tries to show why Arabs feel otherwise.

Live With Yourself—and Like It, by Colette Hovasse (Orbis Books, 162 pp., $1.50 pb). Amusing and often insightful case studies by a Catholic psychologist to support her conviction that it is dangerous to think too highly of oneself.

Women and the Liberator, by William P. Barker (Revell, 128 pp., $3.95). The author is trying to cash in on women’s liberation. His additions to the Bible stories are poorly imagined and written.

Patterns of Christian Acceptance: Individual Response to the Missionary Impact 1550–1950, by Martin Jarrett-Kerr (Oxford, 342 pp., $16.25). An outstanding book. Until recently almost all writing on missions focused on the senders, not the receivers. This book ranges the globe to bring together in a scholarly yet inviting way the best available accounts of what it meant to dozens of individual non-Westerners to become Christians. The writer is a Catholic priest but includes many Protestants in his account.

Situation Ethics, a dialogue between Joseph Fletcher and John Warwick Montgomery (Bethany Fellowship, 90 pp., $2.95, $.95 pb). One of our truly roving contributing editors exposes the hollowness of Fletcher’s position in this useful transcript of a public debate.

What an Ugly, Beautiful World, edited by Harold Myra (Zondervan, 181 pp., $1.25 pb). The editor of Youth for Christ’s Campus Life magazine has compiled a number of valuable articles, many by youth, on the crucial issues of race, sex, music, drugs, and war.

The Nixon Theology, by Charles Henderson, Jr. (Harper & Row, 210 pp., $6.95). Conscious or unconscious theological beliefs influence, perhaps shape, the actions of all of us. Princeton’s chaplain traces the President’s career, citing many crucial statements, trying to infer his largely unconscious beliefs. He finds them defective, but does not carp.

The Denominational Society: A Sociological Approach to Religion in America, by Andrew M. Greeley (Scott, Foresman, 266 pp., $6.95). A Catholic priest-sociologist at the University of Chicago stresses, rightly we think, the importance of seeing the role of denominations in the United States as compared with countries where one religious body predominates.

The Inner War, by Paul A. Lacey (Fortress, 132 pp., $3.95 pb). Commentary on some modern poets. Though not specifically religious, most of these poets consider subjects that ought to interest every Christian.

Christians and Mental Health, by Samuel Southard (Broadman, 128 pp., $1.95). Of some value to those concerned about the relation of Christianity to the often humanistic mental-health movement.

Apocalyptic, by Leon Morris (Eerdmans, 87 pp., $1.95 pb). A helpful, brief discussion of late Jewish, largely pseudonymous apocalyptic literature of the intertestamental period. Draws a sharp distinction between the emphasis on forgiveness and restoration in the “apocalyptic” sections of the New Testament and the vengeful spirit of the non-canonical apocalyptic writings.

American Nonpublic Schools, by Otto Kraushaar (Johns Hopkins, 387 pp., $10). A carefully researched case for compelling all taxpayers to increase greatly their support of the overwhelmingly sectarian nonpublic schools. Does not suggest how schools can offer true alternatives to public education if they become dependent on the public treasury for survival.

A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England, by Derek Wilson (University of Pittsburgh, 287 pp., $9.95). Most accounts of the English Reformation focus on a few at the top. This book tries to show how the masses switched from almost all Catholic to predominantly Protestant between 1520 and 1570.

Frontiers in Missionary Strategy, by Peter Wagner (Moody, 223 pp., $4.95). A longtime missionary to Bolivia, now at Fuller’s School of World Mission, presents a biblically based strategy for reaching major cities abroad with the Gospel.

The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, by Robert Lerner (Univerity of California, 257 pp., $10). A balanced assessment of a wide variety of religious dissenters who were falsely represented in their own time and are often erroneously heralded by secular dissenters in our time.

The Forgiveness of Sins, by Morris Ashcraft (Broadman, 128 pp., $1.95). Excellent brief study of a central trait of God that is all too defectively practiced by his children.

Crisis in Watertown: The Polarization of an American Community, by Lynn Eden (University of Michigan, 218 pp., $6.95). About events leading up to the firing (by a 133 to 77 vote) of a social-activist pastor of a socially prominent United Church of Christ congregation in a small Wisconsin town. Based upon a college student’s summer research of interviewing participants in the controversy.

In His Image, But …: Racism in Southern Religion, 1780–1910, by Shelton Smith (Duke University, 318 pp., $8.50). A thorough study of the primary sources that shows the pervasiveness of white supremacist views among almost all white Christian southerners. (A companion volume is needed on northern attitudes.) One trembles to wonder what scriptural teachings are being as flagrantly transgressed by professing believers today.

Method in Theology, by Bernard Lonergan (Herder and Herder, 405 pp., $10). With a masterly command of a broad spectrum of religious philosophy, Catholicism’s most substantial thinker of our day proposes a method for theological inquiry intended to weave all the strands of Western man’s cultural and spiritual heritage into an attractive carpet on which present-day, mildly progressive Catholicism can stand. Curiously—or characteristically—neither the inspiration nor the authority of the Bible is considered.

Youth Ministry: Its Renewal in the Local Church, by Lawrence Richards (Zondervan, 366 pp., $6.95). A practical book, well written, that every church youth leader should want to read and reread.

The Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom, Volume 5: Types of Religious Culture, by Werner Stark (Fordham University, 453 pp., $12). Final volume of a mammoth work totaling 1,900 pages and begun over nine years ago. The scope is the whole of church history rather than the present. The focus in this volume is on the contrast between Catholic and Calvinist culture.

Lord, Could You Make It a Little Better?, by Robert A. Raines (Word, 147 pp., $4.95). Prayers and poetry attempting to touch the center of living the Christian life in the latter half of this century.

Preaching and Preachers, by D. Martin Lloyd-Jones (Zondervan, 325 pp., $5.95). Sixteen lectures on his craft given at Westminster Seminary by one of the best-known preachers in the English-speaking world. Admittedly opinionative, but the opinions are well worth pondering.

Signs and Wonders, edited by Roger El-wood (Revell, 157 pp., $3.95). These “what if” stories don’t come anywhere close to the standard of Christian science fiction set by such writers as C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams.

Manipulating The Future

Christian Biopolitics, by Kenneth Cauthen (Abingdon, 1971, 159 pp., $4), A New World in the Morning, by David P. Young (Westminster, 1972, 217 pp., $3.25 pb), and The New Genetics and the Future of Man, edited by Michael P. Hamilton (Eerdmans, 1972, 242 pp., $6.95 and $3.95 pb), are reviewed by B. G. Carter, doctoral candidate in political science, University of Maryland, College Park.

These books give no respite from the clamor over the shape—and shaping—of the future. Cauthen offers an integrating perspective. Young focuses upon drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain, and novel methods of procreation. The contributors to Hamilton’s volume elaborate upon these methods and also upon pollution and health.

Cauthen indicates that perhaps only fifteen years remain for making the choices that will avert catastrophe. The material gaps widen—between groups within societies and between entire societies. Population threatens, as does the increase in knowledge.

To avoid chaos men must decrease their numbers. They must reduce armaments and redistribute the material larder. The chief consumers must use less.

Cauthen views life as the central category. Mankind is the unit of loyalty and action. The Holy Spirit yields the joyful and hopeful, futuristic concern.

Some of his projected audience of restless, mainline Protestants will reject his portrayal of Christ as a Son of God and of the Bible as an especially rich treasury of symbols about God.

Others may conclude that his emphasis on the Spirit effaces, rather than corrects, Trinitarian doctrine. He treats immortality as Socrates supposedly did—maybe yes; maybe no; at death we’ll decide. A third theological matter is his contention that the persistence of sin is due to the persistence of human egoism and anxiety.

Young’s three accounts—of drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain, and novel methods of procreation—are admirably succinct. He delivers a factual introduction and then a statement for discussion. He appends pertinent questions and fairly states arguments for or against use.

Along with sensational drugs, Young includes tobacco and notes the coincidence of crime and alcohol. He often illustrates his opinion that knowledge acquires morality only when used. Drugs can be employed therapeutically or to escape from reality. Electrical stimulation of the brain can reduce violent rages or extend political control.

Both Cauthen and Young advocate a correlation of science and religion. Both anticipate that a fuller man or a new man will arise as old prejudices are cast aside and as men experiment.

In Hamilton’s book we hear from able supporters and opponents of Young and Cauthen’s hopeful attitude toward the future.

Canon Hamilton and Joseph Fletcher dismiss any intrinsic objection to laboratory fertilization and maturation of a human fetus. They consistently adhere to a relativistic view in arguing that no moral principle precludes the creation of semi-humans or the asexual procreation of humans, as in the technique of cloning.

Fletcher says that human need alone renders an act morally good or bad. It, in turn, is shown by “common consent and verifiable reasoning.”

In opposition are Leon Kass, a biochemist, and Paul Ramsey. They contend that the procedures above are inherently immoral, for they entail a willingness to submit a potential person, the human fetus, to unknown risks.

In expanding upon his Fabricated Man (Yale, 1970), Ramsey examines the lack of moral warrants to alter human genes. He forcefully and persistently argues that one cannot choose to risk another without the other’s consent. He distinguishes between treatment of diseases and catering to wishes.

Charles Powers acknowledges Christians’ responsibility to control pollutants. Additionally, he warns us to not lose our peculiar witness to God.

Convictions that momentous decisions await us abound in these books. Nearly unbounded hope contrasts with pervasive despair. Christians must not refuse to examine the prospects, or be paralyzed by the number or unfamiliarity of the proposed solutions.

A Treasury Of Detail

The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary. by Ernst Haenchen (Westminster, 1971, 737 pp., $17.50), is reviewed by W. Ward Gasque, assistant professor of New Testament, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

Since its publication in 1956 as the tenth edition of the Commentary on Acts in the famous series founded by H. A. W. Meyer, this work by Professor Ernst Haenchen of Münster has taken its place as the major German commentary on Luke’s second volume. It has been the constant companion of all New Testament scholars working on Acts, and the appearance of the fourteenth German edition (1965) in English dress is a welcome event.

Haenchen builds on the work of Martin Dibelius (1883–1947), who, though he wrote no commentary on Acts, has had an immense influence on Acts criticism in Germany through a series of essays written between 1923 and 1947 (most of which are contained in his Studies in the Acts of the Apostles [E.T. 1956]). While not denying that the author of Luke-Acts was a historian, Dibelius emphasized Luke’s activity as a creative writer. The author, in Dibelius’s view, was not so much concerned to tell his readers exactly what happened in the past (i.e., how the Christian Church came into being and developed during the years A.D. 30–60) as to help them understand their present situation as members of the church in the midst of the Hellenistic world. Luke therefore takes great liberties with the historical data he possesses: he omits certain important details, reinterprets others in a manner congenial to his views and aims, and freely creates events and (especially) speeches. In much of Lucan research outside Germany Dibelius’s influence can be seen in the widespread acceptance of the view that the speeches of Acts are primarily the author’s theological creations rather than summaries of what the purported speakers said, or even patterns of early Christian preaching.

Haenchen’s commentary is an attempt to apply the conclusions of Dibelius in a detailed study of the Book of Acts. The result is a magnificently impressive piece of scholarship—a treasury of bibliographical, philological, and exegetical detail. A more thorough discussion of the narrative of Acts and its problems is hard to imagine, and certainly this is a work no serious student of the New Testament can afford to ignore. Yet, whether Haenchen’s views will find acceptance outside a limited circle of radical scholars in Germany and America is open to question. In fact, it seems quite probable that fifty years from now his commentary will be regarded more as a phenomenon of the history of exegesis than as a lasting contribution to exegesis.

To say this is not to dismiss the author’s work lightly. Rather, it is simply to note that his extreme position on the historical value of Acts (almost nil!) is unlikely to be convincing to those who walk in the tradition of J. B. Lightfoot, Sir William M. Ramsay, and F. F. Bruce, or to those who have studied the writings of A. Wikenhauser, E. Meyer, A. Harnack, and H. J. Cadbury. I myself have made a careful study of the history of modern criticism of the Acts of the Apostles (Manchester University Ph.D. dissertation, 1969) and am convinced that Haenchen’s work, ingenious though it is, has been based on false critical and historical premises. I cannot support this statement with detailed evidence in a brief review, but I have argued this elsewhere and will continue to do so.

Nevertheless, despite this strong criticism, the advanced student will wish to make use of Haenchen’s commentary. The long introduction (132 pages) is probably the best available survey of twentieth-century research and is a mine of bibliographical information. Even when one disagrees with Haenchen, he will find himself forced to look at the text from angles he did not know even existed! Yet the student should never forget that the author’s presentation is extremely one-sided; he should always balance Haenchen’s views by those presented in the writings of H. J. Cadbury, F. F. Bruce, and (most recently) I. H. Marshall.

Much is being said today about a theology of liberation. As I understand this theology it affirms the necessity and imperative for man to be free in affirming his own dignity and humanity. It is also aimed at “freeing up” the oppressed minority groups in this country and subject people all across the world.

This second aspect of liberation theology seems to have primary emphasis in the church today. As it applies to oppressed or minority groups, this freeing up or liberating process seeks change basically in the political, social, and economic spheres of life. The object is to empower groups in all of these areas so they can exercise control and direction over their own lives. To put it in everyday language, minorities are demanding a larger piece of the pie and their share of the action.

As I see it, this is going to happen and must happen if we are to progress as a people and avoid a violent revolution in this country. The theory of self-determination, for the people of the emerging nations and for minorities within our own country, is not only a desired end but something toward which we all should work. It has been put off too long and is not arriving as fast as it should in any part of the world.

I am committed to this liberating process, but I am also convinced that it is destined to failure without an added ingredient that is essential to true liberation and ultimate reconciliation between all men. This added ingredient is the spiritual dimension or inner nature of man which must find reconciliation before freedom and human dignity can be realized.

It seems we are saying to minority groups and economically deprived segments of our society, “When you have more money, more education, more social freedom, and more political power, you will have arrived.” This is portrayed as the goal of life, and this is liberation. In other words, when you get what the middle- and upper-class white society has achieved, you will have entered “the kingdom.”

However, there appears to be a basic flaw of logic here. If all of these things would have brought in the kingdom, we would not have political oppression, social ostracism, and economic exploitation. But we do have these things. There must be another ingredient if man is to be fully human and live a life of love toward other men.

Yes, I am committed to liberation, but to a liberation that begins at the seat of the trouble and then fans out to touch all aspects of society. I am committed to a liberation needed by all men—white, black, brown, red, rich and poor alike. This liberation must be centered in the heart or soul of man. Paul said it this way:

For Christ himself is our way of peace. He has made peace between us Jews and you Gentiles by making us all one family, breaking down the wall of contempt that used to separate us. He took the two groups that had been opposed to each other and made them part of himself; then he fused us together to become one new person, and at last there was peace [Eph. 2:14, 15, Living New Testament].

In another place Paul says,

When anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun. From first to last, this has been the work of God. He has reconciled us men to himself through Christ, and he has enlisted us in this service of reconciliation [2 Cor. 5:17, 18, NEB].

For true liberation to occur it must be of God, and any humanizing process or goal, however noble, is destined to fail apart from the redemption centered in Jesus Christ and brought by the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ sets men free, and Jesus Christ empowers men to lives of love and service toward their fellow men.

I am perfectly aware that many people in the church today would say that the language I have used is outmoded and does not make sense to modern man. But I would hasten to emphasize that when Jesus said, “You must be born again,” it didn’t take 2,000 years for that statement to be questioned. Within seconds, Nicodemus in essence said, “That does not make sense.”

Man-centered man, in any age, has great difficulty accepting the central spiritual truth of the New Testament. This truth is, and always will be, that we are man estranged and lost in desperate alienation from God and our fellow man. From this come all the evils of society—war, racism, and poverty.

The second or redemptive part of this spiritual truth is that our redemption—reconciliation, liberation—is achieved alone in Jesus Christ. We will have redemptive revolution in him, or we will continue to experience violent revolution in all of life as we seek liberation through our own efforts apart from new life in Christ.

I have hope for our time, for I see many people, from all walks of life, turning to Jesus Christ. These include youth from the counter culture, football players on high school and college teams, establishment-type executives, scientists, men and women, young and old. This turning seems to have greater depth and carry over into all aspects of life. The only trouble is that it is just not occurring fast enough. Come, Lord Jesus!—that we might have liberation and redemptive revolution in our time.—IRA GALLAWAY, in engage (March, 1972; © 1972 by the Board of Christian Social Concerns, The United Methodist Church). Reprinted by permission.

Dear Jerry,

I’m glad to hear that you think the Lord is calling you to be a minister. As you know, two years ago I felt the same way. I had to choose between a big-name seminary that had long ago abandoned trust in the Bible and an evangelical seminary that still held the Bible as its real source of authority. Since you are facing that decision now, I’d like to suggest some biblical guidelines.

1. Sound seminary training should be directly and explicitly based on the Bible.

“All scripture is inspired by God [literally, “breathed out by God”] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that [or “in order that”—shows the purpose for which Scripture is inspired] the man of God may be complete [or more precisely, “exactly fitted to his job”], equipped [or “completely furnished”] for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

“I have more understanding than all my teachers, for thy testimonies are my meditation” (Ps. 119:99).

“But his [the blessed man’s] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night [“law” here can apply to the whole Bible]” (Ps. 1:2).

“If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46, 47). A seminary that claims to believe Christ but not the Bible is really not believing Christ at all.

2. By contrast, there is much “theology” that is non-biblical and anti-Christian. We are positively commanded to avoid it.

“See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ” (Col. 2:8).

“Guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20, 21).

“But Jesus answered them, ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God’” (Matt. 22:29). What had they done wrong? Read the context and you will see that they had asked the wrong question; Jesus says that men who don’t know the Bible don’t even ask the right questions.

“Like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings which are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl. 12:11, 12).

From all this, Jerry, I think you can see that to go to a seminary where the Bible is not upheld would be to act as though you yourself thought lightly of the Bible’s value. This would be serious, for God doesn’t treat it as an optional matter; he has sometimes judged people for their rejection of his Word. See, for instance, Isaiah 5:24, 25: “They have rejected the law of the LORD of hosts, and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he stretched out his hand against them and smote them.”

3. True theology is rightly done only with and by believers.

One reason for this is that we need good Christian fellowship to grow to Christian maturity.

“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers” (Ps. 1:1).

“He who walks with wise men becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm” (Prov. 13:20). A “fool” in the Old Testament isn’t necessarily unintelligent; he is a person who doesn’t know the Lord.

“I am a companion of all who fear thee, of those who keep thy precepts” (Ps. 119:63).

But an even bigger reason than Christian fellowship for choosing a seminary true to the Bible is that our real teacher in the things of God is the Holy Spirit. In seminaries that reject the Bible, many teachers don’t even profess to be Christians. How can the Holy Spirit teach through them? Their wisdom cannot be called true wisdom, for “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 111:10), and “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7).

God has given some the gift of teaching “for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12). In Second Timothy 2:2, Paul tells Timothy how to build the church: the teaching he received he should “entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

You probably still have some questions in your mind, Jerry, and I think I can anticipate a few of them.

1. Would an evangelical seminary be too restrictive?

No, it would be more free. Free, that is, in the true sense—the freedom that comes from living in obedience to God. As Psalm 119:45 says, “I shall walk at liberty, for I have sought thy precepts.” Of course, there would not be the pseudo-freedom of the unbeliever, which is really rebellion against God. In Psalm 2:3, for instance, men who set themselves against God’s will cry, “Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us.”

For me, this question was answered when I asked myself whether the Bible itself is too restrictive for me. It certainly isn’t, and neither is a seminary that remains faithful to it.

2. Wouldn’t it be better to go to a more liberal seminary where you could oppose false teaching? Wouldn’t this have the double advantage of strengthening your own convictions and perhaps helping to change the minds of some professors or students?

I think the testimony of Scripture that I quoted above is sufficiently clear on this point. Let me add some practical considerations.

This argument assumes we should tempt ourselves and thereby tempt God (putting him to the test to see if he will preserve us even when we seek out adverse environments). But Jesus tells us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation” (Matt. 6:13), and says, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God” (Matt. 4:7). Our job is to obey God, not to make faith a “work” that we do to gain merit with him or to increase our self-confidence and pride.

This argument also falsely construes the nature of a seminary. The purpose of attending seminary is to learn through positive training. You don’t go to law school if you want to become a doctor. To do so might strengthen your conviction that you want to be a doctor, but where would it leave you? You’d waste a lot of time getting training that would not be of use to you, and you’d have no positive training at all in your chosen field. Similarly, you don’t grow strong by starving yourself.

The second “advantage,” the prospect of convincing others, is just not realistic. A man who has taught a particular brand of theology for twenty years has heard all the arguments any student could think of, plus a few more. He has come miles to get where he is today; if a student moves him a quarter of an inch, it’s pretty amazing.

The situation is not much more promising with students. For every fifteen minutes of conversation you have with a student, the school gets from fifty to a hundred for teaching its position. And it has the advantage of the student’s background and inclinations, which made him choose that particular school.

If you want to minister now, then go minister to the hundreds of people who are eager to hear the Gospel. But if you want to prepare now so you can minister more effectively later, then it doesn’t make sense to choose a seminary for the sole purpose of trying to minister there. This could only be justified by some kind of extraordinary calling from God. I might add that God certainly doesn’t begrudge the time you spend preparing to minister. Remember Jesus, who “when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23).

3. Wouldn’t an evangelical seminary give its graduate much less prestige, and thus less effectiveness for the Lord?

I think this is one of those questions that lurk in the back of our minds, never quite bringing themselves to verbal form. For to ask this question directly almost embarrasses us before God. Our job is to obey God, not to win gold medals for him.

I wouldn’t want you to go to an academically deficient school, of course, but I don’t think that is the case with most large evangelical seminaries today. On the contrary, it is the evangelicals, for instance, who have continued to insist on solid training in Greek and Hebrew. They care what the Bible says. Liberal seminaries have by and large thrown out language requirements.

When we obey God, he makes us effective in the way he has chosen. “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree, planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season [that is, it produces the specific results God ordained for it, at the specific time God planned], and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Ps. 1:1–3).

Whose approval are we seeking, anyway? See Second Timothy 2:15, which in the King James Version reads: “Study [or “eagerly strive”] to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing [or “rightly handling”] the word of truth.”

I’ll continue to pray that God will guide you to the right seminary, Jerry. Meanwhile, I want to encourage you to seek out more Christian men who know you and know the seminary situation, and get their advice. I hope to hear from you soon.

YOUR BROTHER IN CHRIST,

Wayne

Wayne Grudem is a student at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. He has the B.A. from Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship. This summer he is assisting at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Westfield, New Jersey.

Modern humanism and science seem to have ganged up against Christianity. Humanism claims science as its ally and indeed as its foundation, while for good measure it offers itself as the dynamic behind the rise of modern science. And both try to discount Christianity.

Our world is dominated by science. Although it frequently improves our lot, in other ways science presents us with problems terrifying in their scope and possible consequences. We have only to think of nuclear and biological warfare, overpopulation and famine, the destruction of nature, or the totalitarian use of psychological techniques to be convinced of the precipice to which science may have brought us. Science, therefore, is a two-sided coin. To the dismay of some ardent advocates, it is no panacea; it can scarcely solve the problems caused by its own success. To make sense of the world as a whole, therefore, many advocates of science turn to humanism for their ultimate view of reality, taking from science the words to express their humanism.

Other humanists have embellished traditional humanist ideas, such as concern for man’s happiness and welfare, with a gloss of science. It is said that humanists now look to scientific investigation to provide the means of increasing knowledge and so of relieving human distress.

Another cornerstone of modern humanism is evolution. Here a scientific concept is widened to give humanism a means of approaching the whole of reality, with the bonus of providing it with a fashionable weapon against Christianity. The “small-scale one-world cosmology of traditional Christianity” is compared unfavorably with “the wonderful new cosmology, and man’s evolutionary adventures and responsibilities within it.” There can be little doubt that the cosmology of the twentieth century is more exciting than that of the Middle Ages. But since Christians, among others, have helped to formulate it, and since they as much as any others appreciate it, this argument loses much of its force.

Once the links between science and humanism have been forged, only a few simple assumptions are needed to elevate humanism to the high status science enjoys. Science depends on man’s ingenuity, which in turn points to humanism; science is successful, and therefore humanism is seen as the only intellectually respectable path for mankind.

Despite the confident assertions and optimistic bravado of many humanists, all is not well in their secular world. The growth of biological knowledge is presenting civilized man with appalling ethical dilemmas. In the face of these dilemmas, confident humanist generalizations about man’s being “the agent of the world process of evolution, the sole agent capable of leading it to new heights and enabling it to realize new possibilities,” seem naïve. What are the opportunities and perils of the transplantation of organs and tissues, of genetic engineering, of fertilization outside the body? When it comes down to details, most humanists are as reticent to discuss ethics as anyone else.

Humanism, in other words, is still left with the task of providing ordinary men and women with a stimulus to higher achievements. The impetus must come from man alone, and when we are faced with this necessity the steely isolation of man in the absence of God becomes discouragingly apparent. Ronald Fletcher, a professor of sociology, tells us:

Man now faces the task of working through and realizing the promise of the Enlightenment, or losing, in a disaster of inhumanity, the great gains that have been made. For the recognition and even the assumption of responsibility, of course, guarantee nothing. Success or failure, and degrees of either, depend upon our own efforts. There is now no God to promise a satisfactory end to our destiny [“Religion, Morals, and Society,” in History of the Twentieth Century (1970), VIII, 572].

This is the humanist’s road to the future, and it is a perilously uncertain one. Man may or may not make it; he is all alone, and a precipice is near. The great new cosmology may excite his curiosity and stir his admiration, but how will he cope with his neighbor or even himself? We can see the task that lies ahead, but will we ever be in a position to tackle it? This gap between the optimistic side of humanism and the down-to-earth application of exciting principles is a fundamental weakness in humanism—a weakness that plagues mankind.

Christanity speaks to man at precisely this point. It acknowledges man’s inability to rise to the heights he sets himself. Autonomous man is doomed by his own limitations, and therefore humanist man is heading into a cul-de-sac of frustration and failure. But Christianity says there is a way out.

Paul as much as anyone else struggled with this problem. He knew what he should do but in practice failed miserably. “For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self,” he wrote, “but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:22–24). Here Paul stood in the classic position of the good humanist, grasping eagerly for the highest but achieving the mediocre. He longed to serve God and humanity, but found himself failing to control his own emotions and attitudes.

Unlike the humanist, however, Paul had found the answer: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin and death” (Rom. 7:25–8:2). The good life for which the humanist longs is a reality in God’s universe, but in the humanist’s own godless domain it is a meaningless abstraction.

Humanism begins and ends with man and his world, thereby excluding any consideration of an absolute or of anything beyond man. It also begins and ends with the acceptance of things as they are. This means that everything is equally “given” as it is; final causes are never considered. Why is there a universe? What is its purpose? For the humanist these questions are meaningless, because their answers require something above and beyond man’s own experience.

Although humanism dispenses with absolute values and with God, the supreme absolute, we still must ask: What is man’s reason for being? Is there any value in the survival of the human race? The humanist finds his answer in an arbitrary moral principle. Goodness, he says, means that which is good for man, and so if man were to disappear there would no longer be any goodness. This of course in no way answers the problem. It does serve to highlight the tenuous nature of a man-centered system that attempts to retain a set of moral principles.

Because humanists believe that humanity is worth caring for, they value qualities like courage, endurance, honesty, loyalty, justice and impartiality of mind, toleration, and the disinterested pursuit of truth. Fulfillment and the enrichment of life are generally viewed as overriding aims of existence. The humanist is against hunger, poverty, ignorance, cruelty, and bloodshed, and the Christian, of course, has no quarrel with these aims.

But what has basic humanism (as distinguished from evolutionary humanism, or some mystical form of humanism) to offer? What hope does it hold out when man feels imprisoned in his present existence, with nothing but death to look forward to? In an essay entitled “The Pointlessness of It All,” H. J. Blackham, secretary of the British Humanist Association, faces this penetrating question. His answer is that on humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing; every pretense that it does not is a deceit. The humanist therefore has to accept time and destruction as essential human resources of life and living.

Of even greater poignancy is this quotation from another humanist:

Dwelling Place

Dreaming in Greek, we

visioned for your abode

a temple—seeing

in that rare and rational Attic atmosphere

ideal man, ordered, balanced,

all corners predictably square.

Why is it then

you are so often found in residence

(rather, at home, daheim, chez toi)

in these unfinished oddities,

these curious polygonals,

impractical, improbable,

crowned with foolish fretwork?

What charms you up a fluted spiral stair,

unsafe and unsupported?

What do you look to see from tilted cupolas?

And furthermore

do you not care

that in the best celestial circles

they speak of Yahweh’s Folly?

MARY LOUISE TIETJEN

Humanism … has to recognize an inescapable undertone of tragedy in the world. Ultimately, the situation of mankind in the world is a tragic one.… All that we are, all that we love, all those things, people, and values to which and to whom we are attached by love, perish. Nothing of an individual nature seems permanent. Nothing is certain. Humanism can offer no consolation [Ronald Fletcher, Question 1 (London: Pemberton, 1968), p. 151.

There is an alternative, although the humanist refuses it. Man can escape the tragedy of his situation, but the way of escape is drastic, revolutionary. It requires questioning man’s place in the universe and the freedom he assumes he has as an autonomous being.

It is not a fact of nature that man is the pivot of the universe. This is a presupposition based upon belief in man’s powers to dominate nature and himself. What is more, such an interpretation of man is no guarantee that the world will take on meaning and purpose. An autonomous man in an autonomous world can achieve greatness only if he is correctly programmed, and how can we be sure of that?

Underlying the views of humanists is a thoroughgoing materialism impossible to justify on scientific, rational, or logical grounds. Man is thought to exist solely as a result of undetermined physical events over which neither he nor any supernatural being had any control. He exists; that is all that can be said.

Humanism claims to limit its knowledge of the world to those ideas that stem from man and his rationality. In effect, this approach tells little even about man himself because it has dehumanized man. After all, if man is the chance result of a mindless process, what confidence can be placed in his thinking and beliefs? Why should man be any greater than the processes that gave rise to him? If there was no value or purpose in his origin, can value be derived from his existence? Surely it is presumption for man to inject value into his own existence and ignore the claims of other spheres of the material world.

When the humanist claims to hold men, both individuals and groups, in high regard, he is imposing a value system on his basic view of mankind. We should be grateful that many humanists do place a high value on individuals, but this is not an integral part of their view of man. As a superimposed value it is vulnerable: what can be added can equally well be removed, a fact evident in all fascist and communist regimes.

The Christian, by contrast, values man because he believes that man is made in the image of a personal God. In the words of Michael Green, “Man’s freedom, his self-consciousness, his sense of values, his creativity, his heroism, his conscience, his love all make sense; they derive from the personal God who is the source of our being” (Runaway World, [Inter-Varsity Press, 1968], p. 51). Behind each individual is the personal God; characteristics of this divine Person shine through everyone. God cares for everyone, however wretched, unpromising, or hopeless he may appear in human terms. Therefore it is our duty to care also. The servant is not above his Master, and our criteria for judging individuals must be the same as His—as broad, as deep, as all-encompassing.

Christian values are therefore enshrined in what man is. In practice, humanist values may well resemble the Christian’s, because, whatever their beliefs, humanists too are God’s creation and they too share in the basic demands of humanity. But their theory is inadequate and contradictory. It is tragically stunted by its denial of the sinfulness of mankind and the redemptive work of Christ.

To the Christian, therefore, many of the problems confronting humanism are problems of its own making. If man is elevated to the status of sole controller of the world, he must also be solely responsible for the consequences. As even many humanists now admit, man is not completely rational. But how can irrational actions and consequences be fitted into the humanist conception of the good life? It would appear either that the good life is unobtainable or that achieving it depends upon compulsion. But compulsion by force is condemned by humanists, to whom the individual and his freedom are important principles. Therefore their dilemma is grave.

Such dilemmas are inevitable in humanist terms, because if man is autonomous, any irrationality in his make-up is disastrous. Man is free to live as he determines, and yet is not always competent to direct his freedom wisely. He is therefore faced with incompetence, stupidity, and possibly calamity, unless his freedom is forcibly restrained. Either way, humanist ideals are thwarted, as anarchy or dictatorship looms large on the horizon. Humanism as a civilized institution is saved by the pluralistic, and in many aspects Christian, society in which it finds itself.

Humanism, then, offers man no hope outside benefits obtainable in this life. The Christian would agree that the humanist’s goals of human satisfaction and fulfillment are extremely important. They are goals after which Christians themselves should strive, and which they should desire and work for in the lives of other people. There is no inherent contradiction between fulfillment in this life and fulfillment in eternity. The difference between Christians and humanists on this point comes down to a question of the meaning of “fulfillment.” The humanist rejects what the Bible sets forth as the highest fulfillment, the living of life in the knowledge and love of God.

The offer of salvation in Christ is an offer not only of an eternity with God but also of fullness of life now, with a new view of life, a new approach to life, a new power to live the good life, a mind equipped to face the intellectual problems and challenges of life. The renewal man experiences in Christ is thorough and all-embracing. Emotional, physical, mental, and intellectual spheres are affected, so that each becomes capable of fulfillment and satisfaction. The whole man is renewed in Christ. Anything less is only an imitation of biblical Christianity.

Christianity challenges the humanist to “try it and see.” If humanism is as empirical and scientific as it claims to be, it could do worse than to take the claims of Christianity and assess them in the practical realm.

D. Gareth Jones is senior lecturer in anatomy at the University of Western Australia, Nedlands. He has the B.Sc. from University College, London, and a medical degree from University College Hospital Medical School.

Inspiration extends to every part of Scripture, even to the very words. The process, however, by which Scripture was given, or the “how” of inspiration, has been much debated among those who are agreed that the Bible in all its parts is the Word of God written. Inspiration does not stand alone. Along with it are such concepts as revelation, authority, illumination, infallibility, and inerrancy—all of which require precise definition to understand what is meant by the inspiration of the Scripture.

Theological Definition

1. Revelation. Basic to the evangelical view of Scripture is the conviction that God has chosen to disclose himself. “Revelation” is the term used to depict his self-disclosure. God has revealed himself in nature, his creation. He has chosen also to reveal himself supremely in the person of Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. The revelation of Jesus Christ is known through the written Word of God, which is special revelation. The purpose of this written Word is to reveal the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and the purpose of the incarnate Word is to reveal the Father and bring salvation. Therefore the Bible is the objective, propositionally revealed Word of God.

God’s self-revelation was given through two media. Parts of that revelation came directly and immediately from God in the form of oracular words, signs, visions, and dreams. This kind of data is known only because God chose to communicate it directly to men. A great part of the biblical material, however, has come through God’s operation in history via his saving acts. This historical material has been made available either through oral tradition or written records, both of which were used when the books of the Bible were indited. Moses, in the Pentateuch, undoubtedly used oral tradition and extant written records in addition to recording what he had experienced personally and what was revealed to him directly by God. In the case of the historical books in the Old Testament much of the material used in them was taken from extant court records.

The same procedure is true for the New Testament. Luke, the physician, was also a historian. He searched out his material, using written records and verifying oral traditions. In contrast, John penned the Revelation, not from oral tradition or written records, but from direct revelation by God.

2. Inspiration. Technically, revelation preceded inspiration, which has to do with the divine method of inscripturating the revelation, whether what was written came to the writer by direct communication from God, from his own research, from his own experience, or from extant records. Inspiration includes the superintending work of the Holy Spirit, but the human writers of Scripture were not automatons. Each writer had his own style. Each one used the Hebrew or the Greek language according to his unique gifts and educational background. At the same time that God used human authors in harmony with their gifts he also indited holy Scripture.

Some have argued falsely that the Scripture was dictated by God and that the writers were mere secretaries who took down for inscripturation what God spoke, and thus were passive rather than active agents in the process. However, evangelicals generally have held that the Scriptures are both the words of men and the words of God. This dynamic view allows for the use of human faculties and at the same time assures that God secured his predetermined ends so that in the fullest sense the Bible is the Word of God written. The purpose of inspiration extends to the whole corpus of Scripture so that in its thoughts and words it is plenarily, or fully, and verbally inspired.

3. Authority. Inspiration carries with it the divine authority of God so that Scripture is binding upon the mind, heart, and conscience as the only rule of faith and practice for the believer. In its authority, Scripture stands above men, creeds, and the Church itself. All of them are subject to Scripture, and any authority that any one of them may exert is valid insofar as it can be supported from Scripture. Creeds are to be accepted only when they concur with Scripture, for Christian conscience cannot be bound by anything not taught explicitly in Scripture or logically derived from it. Nor can any church bind men to its teaching except as it reflects the truth of Scripture. Men, like creeds and churches, are likewise bound to Scripture so that they can neither release men from what it teaches nor bind them to what it does not teach. “Sola scriptura” (“the Bible alone”) is the enduring principle.

4. Illumination. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, who enlightens the minds of men as they read the Scripture. Because of sin and its effects, men are incapable of rightly understanding the Scripture apart from the enlightenment that comes only from the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:6–16). Illumination is not to be confused with inspiration. The latter refers to those who penned the Scripture. The former refers to those who read the Scripture. The writers of Scripture were inspired; the readers of Scripture are illuminated.

5. Infallibility and inerrancy. Although inspiration is different from infallibility, or inerrancy, no discussion of inspiration can be continued without considering these terms. Infallibility and inerrancy are synonymous. The ordinary dictionary meaning of “infallible” is “inerrant” or “unerring.” In bygone years, the term “infallible” was used extensively with respect to Scripture, but the word was watered down and began to lose some of its force. In recent decades, evangelicals have substituted the word “inerrant.” At stake is the question whether inspiration includes infallibility, or inerrancy, and whether the latter extends to all of Scripture or only to some of the teachings of Scripture.

Neither the word “inspiration” nor the word “infallibility” is found in the earliest creeds; yet both are there implicitly. That they are not mentioned specifically is no substantive reason to suppose that they were unimportant concepts. The creeds and confessions of the Reformation and post-Reformation period generally speak about inspiration and infallibility. The Westminster Confession of Faith says the Scriptures “are given by inspiration of God.” They are to be received as the Word of God, and are to be believed and obeyed. It also speaks of the Bible’s “incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof” as well as “our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth.” The Baptist New Hampshire Confession states:

We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without mixture of error for its matter; that it reveals the principles by which God will judge us, and therefore is, and shall remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried.

Unquestionably, the evangelical creeds commonly stress inspiration and infallibility (or inerrancy). In recent decades, efforts have been made among those formally attached to evangelical theology to reexamine the concept of inerrancy and in some instances to qualify it. At the same time, they have sought to retain a doctrine of biblical authority. These efforts have not produced any really new formulations. Some have said that the purpose and intent of the writers is important and that in some parts of Scripture it was not their intention to write inerrantly. Others have alleged that the writers were men of their times in respect to history, cosmology, physics, and astronomy. They wrote what men then believed but what now is known to be untrue. Some say that the biblical writers were infallible teachers, but that errors exist in those portions of the Bible that were not written for teaching purposes.

The effort to maintain the inspiration of Scripture while allowing for error is self-defeating. To retain an errant inerrancy dilutes the doctrine of inspiration and radically undermines its meaning and its usefulness. Few theologians would hold that adherence to orthodox notions of inspiration or inerrancy is necessary to salvation, but this should in no way obscure the importance of these concepts.

Inspiration is inextricably linked to authority and inerrancy. Charles Hodge (Systematic Theology, I, 170, 171) perceived this when he inquired whether the Bible contains historical and scientific untruths. He asserted that there is a vital difference between what the biblical writers thought and believed on the personal level and what they wrote in Scripture. They may have believed that the sun revolves around the earth, but they did not teach this in Scripture. The language of the Bible is everyday language and is based upon the apparent. Phenomenological language was used in that day as it is used today. Moreover, Hodge distinguished between fact and theory. Theories are manmade. Facts are of God. The Bible never contradicts facts, but it does contradict men’s theories. When interpretation conflicts with established facts, then interpretation must yield. The Bible has stood this test, and it will stand through all ages with its claims unshaken and its teaching unimpaired.

Those who reject inerrancy often argue that inspiration is a biblically based doctrine but inerrancy is not; it can only be inferred and therefore should not be binding or made a test of faith. This question, which belongs not so much to the realm of theological definition as to biblical exegesis, leads logically to a discussion of the teaching of Scripture about itself, its inspiration, its infallibility, and its authority.

Biblical Exegesis

The Bible claims for itself the unique distinction of being the Word of God. The phrase “Thus says the Lord,” or its equivalent, occurs over 2,000 times in the Old Testament. Isaiah said: “Then the LORD said to me … For the LORD spoke thus to me …” (Isa. 8:1, 11). David exclaimed: “The Spirit of the LORD speaks by me, his word is upon my tongue. The God of Israel has spoken, the Rock of Israel has said to me …” (2 Sam. 23:1–3). Jeremiah asserted: “Then the LORD put forth his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth’ ” (Jer. 1:9; 5:14; 7:27; 13:12).

The New Testament writers do the same. They assert that the Old Testament prophets spoke the Word of God. “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets” (Heb. 1:1). Old Testament prophecies concerning Jesus Christ were “what the Lord had spoken of the prophet” (Matt 1:22; 2:15). The Holy Spirit spoke “by the mouth of David” (Acts 1:16), and “to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet” (28:25). The Jews of Jesus’ day believed the Old Testament to be the infallible Word of God, accepting on every hand the testimony of the writers that what they said was what God said.

1. The Testimony of Jesus. Jesus claimed that the Word of God is inspired and infallible. In Matthew 5:18 he said: “Till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota or dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” The Interpreter’s Bible says that Jesus in this instance was talking about the written Old Testament. The use of “iota” and “dot,” referring to the smallest character of the Hebrew alphabet and the tiniest part of any Hebrew letter, makes clear how highly Jesus regarded the Old Testament (see The Interpreter’s Bible, VII, 292). Even so radical a critic as Rudolph Bultmann says that “Jesus agreed with the scribes of his time in accepting without question the authority of the [Old Testament] Law” (Jesus and the Word, p. 61).

In many instances, Jesus reiterated his belief in the infallibility of Old Testament Scripture, as, for example, in Mark 7:13, “thus making void the word of God through your tradition which you hand on”; in John 10:35, “Scripture cannot be broken”; in Luke 16:31, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead”; and in Luke 24:27, “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” Jesus preauthenticated the New Testament in John 14:26, “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

So high was Jesus’ view of the Scripture that in two instances (Matt 22:43–45 and John 10:34, 35) his whole argument rested upon a single word. He viewed the Scripture as verbally inspired and wholly trustworthy. To deny his view is to deny his person; to accept his person is to accept his view of Scripture.

2. The testimony of the Apostle Paul. Paul, in a key passage dealing with inspiration, said to Timothy, “All [every] scripture is inspired by God [theopneustos—God-breathed] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16). The Greek word theopneustos is a compound of theos (God) and pneustos (breathed). The tos at the end of pneustos makes it passive in meaning. This indicates that theopneustos should be properly translated “breathed out by God.” Thus Scripture has its origin in God, not in man. The creative breath of God himself gave us Scripture. Moreover, pasa graphe, “all Scripture,” refers to the written words, not simply to the divine meaning. The very words of Scripture are thus inspired, or breathed out, by God. Some conservative Bible scholars are not happy that theopneustos has been translated “inspired,” as though to suggest that the Scriptures are human writings to which has been added the divine breath. Paul says that the Scriptures originated from God himself, not simply from men upon whom a divine influence came. Once it has been established that the Scriptures are “breathed out by God,” it follows axiomatically that the books of the Bible are free from error and trustworthy in every regard.

Inspiration guarantees the truth-claim of Scripture, but this has to do with the originals (the autographs), not the copies, for few would deny that there are some copyists’ errors. The human authors of Scripture accepted the common scientific and other notions of their day, but when they wrote about factual, historical, and scientific matters they were preserved from error by the Holy Spirit and never wrote or taught what is not true. Paul’s claim is one that extends to all Scripture, not just parts of it. He does not say that all Scripture is of equal value, however, for the didactic books are of greater significance than books like Ruth and Esther.

Paul’s teaching about biblical inspiration does not mean that everything in the Bible is true per se. Scripture assures us that what Satan said to Jesus in the wilderness temptation and what Job’s friends said to him in conversation are what they really said. Whether what they said is true or false is determined by the context. The biblical writers used figures of speech, and Jesus himself spoke in parables and employed allegory. These are not to be taken literally. Rather, their meanings are to be ferreted out in accordance with the principles of hermeneutics.

Elsewhere Paul asserts clearly that what he has written is the revelation of God. In First Corinthians 2:12, 13 he says: “We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.”

A. T. Robertson in his Word Pictures in the New Testament writes:

So then Paul claims the help of the Holy Spirit in the utterance [laloumen] of the words.… Clearly Paul means that the help of the Holy Spirit in the utterance of the revelation extends to the words. No theory of inspiration is here stated, but it is not mere human wisdom. Paul’s own Epistles bear eloquent witness to the lofty claim here made. They remain today after nearly nineteen centuries throbbing with the power of the Spirit of God, dynamic with life for the problems of today as when Paul wrote them for the needs of the believers in his time, the greatest epistles of all time, surcharged with the energy of God” [IV, 88].

In First Corinthians 14:37 Paul wrote: “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord.” Here he claims inspiration for his position.

As if this were not enough, Paul tells the Thessalonians, “We also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God” (1 Thess. 2:13). Paul says that what he has written is really the word of God. It is not the words of men, although penned by men. It does not contain the word of God; it is the word of God. The Thessalonians accepted Paul’s claim and received what he preached and wrote as that which came from God. Nothing could have been more plain. Paul asserts that his words are Spirit-taught and do not spring from human reason (cf. 1 Cor. 2:13).

3. The testimony of the Apostle Peter. Peter writes: “You must understand this, that … no prophecy ever came by the impulses of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:20, 21). He was seeking to persuade his readers of the divine origin of Scripture. In doing this he said negatively that it did not come from the will of man. Rather, as Matthew Henry says, the authors of Scripture were holy men moved by the Holy Spirit:

[The Spirit] powerfully excited and effectually engaged them to speak (and write) what he had put in their mouths. He so wisely and carefully assisted and directed them in the delivery of what they had received from him that they were effectually secured from any mistake in expressing what they revealed; so that the very words of scripture are to be accounted the words of the Holy Ghost … [Commentary. VI, 1044].

4. Conclusion. The teaching of Christ, the prophets, and the apostles should settle the matter of biblical authority and inspiration once for all. But for those who desire further confirmation, in addition to the teaching of Scripture concerning itself, there are other evidences. Predictive prophecy testifies to biblical inspiration and trustworthiness. Archaeology continues to confirm the historical accuracy of the Bible. The pragmatic test of personal experience shows that when men taste and see, they discover that the Bible works in their lives (see, e.g., Ps. 34:8; 119:103). The Holy Spirit witnesses to the spirits of men that the Bible is the very Word of God (see 1 John 5:7, RSV; v. 6 in KJV).

Any view of inspiration produces problems, some of which yield easily to solutions and others of which do not. But this is true of other biblical doctrines as well. No one surrenders his belief in the love of God because of unresolved problems. No one dismisses the doctrine of the Trinity because the concept of one God eternally subsistent in three persons is most difficult to understand. So it is with inspiration. Many of the difficult problems have been resolved. Some problems remain, but it is unnecessary to surrender the Bible’s own teaching with respect to its inspiration because of some unresolved problems.

The Bible teaches that it is the Word of God and the only infallible rule of faith and practice. But this teaching of the Bible concerning itself would be relatively useless if no one accepted its claims and propagated them. Thus no discussion of inspiration is complete without a historical overview in which the attitude of the Christian Church and its theologians toward Scripture is delineated.

Obsessed with nudity and overt sex, hankering after Oriental religions and the occult, London and the other great Western capitals are fast reproducing the paganism of Corinth and Ephesus and other cities in the age of the Apostle Paul. If modern superstitions do not camouflage materialism as much as the ancients masked it by worship of gods and goddesses, man still displays his anxiety to stifle spiritual hunger while going his own way.

But Paul and his friends overturned paganism: the Gospel won in the end. Christians were a tiny minority then, yet the future lay with them and not with the apparently indestructible systems and showpieces of the pagan supremacy.

In that context, we may well focus attention on Paul’s personality. In ages when Christianity appeared dominant, the Apostle’s personality could be forgotten amid discussion and analysis of his doctrines; today, when Christians are faced with recapturing lost ground, they may usefully consider what sort of man won the early, amazing victories, and a mere biographer may creep in among the mighty theologians, philosophers, and newsmen.

Evangelicals believe, with Paul, that he would have achieved nothing except by the transcendent power of God, through the Word preached and the Spirit, which applied the Word to those who believed; still, the earthen vessel that carried the treasure was a vital factor.

Paul is a far more attractive personality than superficial readers will allow. Although he has not had a very good press, the more one studies the Acts and the Epistles for biographical evidence, the more delightful he appears.

Paul had the gift of evoking loyalty. Mutual dedication to a cause alone would not have produced Timothy’s love for him, or Luke’s; Barnabas too was evidently most fond of Paul, and this made their separation the more poignant. Paul made a good companion; those men could never have endured the long journeys on foot through wild mountains and dreary plains unless happy in one another’s company. Paul always preferred a team. He did not like being alone for long. In Philippi, unselfishly, he left Luke to nurse the infant church when Silas and he obliged the officers by departing, with sore backs but dignity; in Thessalonica and Berea he left Silas and Timothy to guard the converts. Thus when his Berean escort left him in Athens and returned home, Paul remained alone. And his loneliness in that city of idolatry and philosophy comes out strongly in the letter that he wrote to the Thessalonians from Corinth soon after.

Only once during the missionary journeys did Paul set off by himself deliberately. He walked a day and a half from Troas to Assos while the others sailed round Cape Lectum. It is an entrancing walk, with the dark blue hills of Lesbos seen across a narrow strip of sapphire water to his right and the distant hills round Pergamum on the horizon in front, and the rock of Assos drawing nearer as he walked. I believe he walked in order to face, alone with the Lord Jesus, the tough future of bonds and imprisonments. This walk enabled him to say soon: “None of these things moves me.”

Paul is popularly supposed to be a misogynist, or at least a disapprover of women. This reputation rests on too hasty a reading of famous passages in First Corinthians divorced from context. He may perhaps have felt a little impatient with women as a sex, or even been a little too conscious that Eve first fell, then Adam. In his dealings with individuals, however, he is chivalrous, understanding, and appreciative, as with Priscilla, who risked her own neck for his sake, and other women to whom he sent touching messages when writing to the Romans and to the Philippians. My personal reading of the scanty extant evidence is that he was not a bachelor but a widower, or, more probably, had been repudiated by his wife when he returned to Tarsus a Christian—he suffered the loss of all things for Christ.

The Victorian biographer F. W. Farrar decided that Paul lacked a sense of humor. The worthy dean had probably never trekked through hard country with companions; he had certainly not been in prison. A man’s nerves grow taut in such circ*mstances unless he can laugh at himself and at difficulties. A man who wrote much about rejoicing could hardly be humorless; had Paul’s joy been merely the sober, godly “joy” of a good man who never laughed, the jailors and soldiers of his imprisonments would not have learned to love his Lord. And who can read Philemon in the original Greek that Paul dictated in a prison cell without noticing his playfulness?

If he did not lack a sense of humor, he certainly had a temper. I always remember the late Mrs. Will R. Moody, daughter-in-law of D. L. Moody, whom she had known since her childhood, describing how the lovable evangelist lost his temper at some mischief of his two boys; that evening he went up to their bedrooms and apologized, saying, “That was not Christ’s way.” Then Mrs. Will Moody (aged ninety) added sweetly: “I don’t think much of a man if he hasn’t got a temper. Do you?”

Paul flared up, white hot, at the treachery of the Galatians who had so soon deserted Christ for another gospel. During his trial before the Sanhedrin he snapped at the (unrecognized) high priest. Later Paul grew to believe that anger was no weapon for the armory of a Christian. The pastoral epistles show a gentleness under every provocation, as if he had grown into his own teaching, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour … be put away from you.… And be kind one to another, tenderhearted.”

His capacity for growth is a secret of Paul’s greatness. If you study Acts and the epistles from a biographical angle, treating them as source material without getting very involved in the textual arguments of biblical scholars, this aspect of growth will appear strongly. Incidentally, you will be struck as I was by the genuineness and credibility of the character that emerges in this way from the New Testament.

Paul had his weaknesses—perhaps one was a tendency to justify himself. Yet what a man he was compared with any of us. And how far short he fell of the standard of his Master. He was first to admit this but never ceased aiming to be more like his Master. “Be imitators of me,” he could say boldly, because he added: “as I imitate Christ.”

When I was writing a biography of Paul (The Apostle) and reached the point where he is dictating First Corinthians, I wanted to show the range of meanings of each Greek phrase in the matchless central section of the thirteenth chapter without interrupting the narrative flow. As a first step I made a chart for myself showing the different words used by six or seven modern translations. Suddenly they merged into a character sketch of the Lord Jesus (Paul’s favorite phrase for his Master).

So I suggested in the book that before continuing his dictation Paul went away alone on a hillside above Ephesus and looked, though only as through a colored glass, at the face of Perfect Love as he had come to know him, the Lord Jesus: patient and kind, never jealous, not possessive, envying no one. Not boastful nor anxious to impress; not arrogant, proud, or haughty, not giving himself airs. Not rude or discourteous. The Lord Jesus did not insist on his own way, pursue selfish advantage, claim his rights. He was not touchy or irritable or quick to take offense. He did not brood on injustice, bear a grudge, or show resentment; he did not gloat over other men’s sins or feel pleased when others went wrong; nor did he condone injustice. Instead he was gladdened by goodness and could overlook faults. There was no limit to his endurance, no end to willingness to trust, no fading of his hope.

This was the personality Paul sought to be like. Men saw as he lived among them what Paul had become, and many sought the power that made the man.

Paul’s skill as a preacher and debater needs no elaboration. He was a superb strategist, too, who planned campaigns carefully, yet had that supreme gift of generalship, ability to seize the unexpected opportunity, as at Athens, or to retrieve a disaster and “turn it to a testimony,” as in the riot at Jerusalem or the shipwreck.

A Reason For Hammers

The strange beast

I used to be

still hides

in the back of a mirror

I find sometimes conceald

in the pocket of

my best suit.

It is a dark & rusty

mirror. I’ve had

the pockets sewn shut

but still feel an opaque

rectangle nicking my flesh

with murky corner.

I smash the cloth with heavy steel

but then the grains

of dark reflection

work thru my skin

to become seeds of pain

in my bloody garden.

These strange plants deceive no one.

EUGENE WARREN

He could also quickly assess the best route to an audience’s heart and mind. In the Athens streets, if one reads between the lines of the brief account in Acts, he used the familiar Socratic method; when summoned to defend his teaching before the Court of the Areopagus, he employed allusions to Aeschylus, Plato, and Epimenides, even a touch of Euripides—but all to lead his audience to the incomparable glories and uncompromising demands of the love of God in Christ. In Ephesus, the city of magic and spells and abracadabras worn next to the skin, Paul allowed his sweat-bands to be laid on patients by his converts, as a focus for weak faith, as they prayed for healing in the Name of Jesus.

Adaptability of method coupled with consistency of message, always a sign of an outstanding evangelist, is seen to a marked degree in Billy Graham. Graham has studied Paul’s methods and indeed follows him exactly when bringing the Gospel to heads of state: like Paul before Agrippa, Graham introduces Christ by way of personal testimony.

Paul would certainly have seized Graham’s opportunities for reaching vast audiences. These were denied him. On the only occasion when he came near to preaching to 19,000 at once—when the citizens of Ephesus were jammed, yelling, in the theater cut from the hillside of Pion—Paul’s powerful friends in the civic government would not allow him to risk his life.

He worked instead through small groups of men and women who caught his enthusiasm for Christ and passed it on—fast. The extraordinary speed with which the Gospel spread came home to me when I walked beside Lake Egridir in Anatolia, the Lake Limnai in Southern Galatia of Paul’s day, and then looked carefully at the New Testament record. This little-known lake is one of the world’s most beautiful. The hills all about it, and a snow-capped Mount Olympus far ahead, make a perfect setting for the startling turquoise of the water. When Paul and Barnabas first walked up the lakeside, past village after village of reed-thatched cottages, not one Christian lived in the region; a year later they came down again from Derbe and Lystra and Iconium and Pisidian Antioch, which lay on the far side of Mount Olympus—and found the lakeside districts alive with Christians. It was the same story in Corinth and Ephesus: the Gospel spread fast.

Paul would have had no doubt of the basic reason: his Gospel was “the power of God unto salvation.” It was not he who achieved these results but “the grace of God that was with me.”

The overriding factor in Paul’s personality was his passion for the Lord Jesus. It is impossible to study Paul’s life and character with an unprejudiced biographical eye without a growing conviction that he believed totally that Jesus not only died on the Cross but rose bodily from the grave. Paul as the New Testament discloses him is absolutely certain that Jesus is alive: that the dead, crucified Man of Nazareth has risen from the grave and is at Paul’s side, “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

All Paul’s journeys, his sufferings and self-denials, his mental wrestlings and hard sayings, are simply the consequence of his unquenchable desire to help others to know his best Friend.

John Pollock is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Hudson Taylor, D. L. Moody, Billy Graham, the Apostle Paul, and—the most recent—L. Nelson Bell (“A Foreign Devil in China”). He has the Master of Arts from Trinity College, Cambridge, and also studied at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, a theological college.

Washington’s summer doldrums were interrupted by the McGovern-Eagleton pas de deux, again by the Senate’s effort to cut off money for the war in Viet Nam, and later by the Republicans’ mass exodus to Miami, one place that is even less desirable than Washington in summertime.

Now we wouldn’t want to say that our CHRISTIANITY TODAY staff has been suffering from summer doldrums also. Despite the August presence among us of our British editorial representative, self-affirmed collector of Magnificent Grievances (in a delightful style that J. D. Douglas-readers know well), we’ve read and written, dictated and debated our way through the summer with our customary good cheer. Nevertheless we welcomed the bright news that Montreat-Anderson College dedicated its new library-learning resource center in honor of Dr. L. Nelson Bell, our founding executive editor and “Layman” columnist for sixteen years. At seventy-eight Dr. Bell leads a more active life than many people at fifty-eight.

Perhaps the most crucial issue in Christianity now is the trustworthiness of the Bible. An essay I wrote on this will appear in the forthcoming Zondervan Pictorial Bible Encyclopedia. But I wanted to share my views with readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY now, because of recurring battles at this point in institutions and groups generally considered evangelical. The essay will appear in two parts, this issue and next.

Under the heading “God’s Little Dice Game,” the Melbourne Age recently published a review of Jacques Monod’s book Chance and Necessity. The reviewer introduced Monod as a Nobel Prize-winner and a best-selling author, an unusual combination for a scientist.

According to the reviewer, scientists have discovered “that there doesn’t seem to be a secret [of life]; and that the enormous variety of nature and the richness of human culture can all be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry.”

Monod’s book is said to fit into this picture. He rejects the thought of an overall great plan, saying, “We know that all that is passed from generation to generation is a chemical. Except in rare cases (some viruses) this is DNA, which must be very stable, otherwise offspring would not resemble their parents. Like any chemical, it can be affected by heat or by radiation, and the mutations that evolution works on can be accounted for simply by these.” The review adds, “Not only does science not need a plan, but it now knows that there cannot be a plan.”

Without the book before me I would not attempt to comment on it in detail. But the statement that “there cannot be a plan” in the universe is one worth looking at, quite irrespective of the way Monod works out his thesis.

For it is clear that, like many others, he is overlooking the elementary fact that we can often give more than one explanation of an occurrence, such that each is true and each is complete in itself. A homely illustration is the boiling kettle. In answering the question “Why is the kettle boiling?” one can speak of the striking of a match, the kindling of a gas flame, the increase of the temperature of the water, and so on. The chain of cause and effect can be complete.

But it is also possible to answer the question by saying, “Because I want to make a cup of coffee.”

The second answer is just as true as the first. It would be foolish to deny the truth of the second on the grounds that the first can be demonstrated scientifically. The scientific explanation, while true, is not the only one. And it may be argued that it is not the most significant one. The personal factor is important.

Professor D. M. Mackay, professor of communication in the University of Keele, England, made a similar point in a lecture he gave in Melbourne recently. He reminded his audience that it is possible to explain the workings of a computer purely in terms of transistors and the like. The explanation is complete. Nothing is missed. Yet this does not prevent us from having another, quite different understanding of what is going on. We can say instead that the computer is solving the problem the programmer has fed into it. Indeed, without the thought that the programmer’s purpose is being worked out, most of us would consider the account of the computer’s operation a trifle defective. The technological explanation, though in its way complete, is unsatisfying if taken alone. Professor Mackay was making a point about the way the brain works, but his illustration is relevant to our topic also.

So far we have looked at two kinds of answer. Examined more closely they are answers to two different questions. The scientist who explains the boiling of the kettle or the working of the computer is really answering the question “How?” (though the question may have been asked in the form “Why?”). His concern is with the way things work. The question “Why?,” on the other hand, is really concerned with purpose. When this question is asked, the answer should be given in terms of my cup of coffee, or the question I have put to the computer.

The scientific method is perfectly adequate for answering the question “How?” But the fact that the scientist answers his own question so well does not give him justification for denying that other questions may be asked of the same phenomena and other answers may be given. In his legitimate preoccupation with his own approach he must not overlook other possibilities.

And, of course, many scientists do not overlook them. Einstein rejected a view much like Monod’s by saying. “I cannot believe that God plays at dice” (hence the title of the review article). On another occasion he said, “The scientist must see all the fine and wise connections of the universe and appreciate that they are not of man’s invention. He must feel toward that which science has not yet realized like a child trying to understand the works and wisdom of a grown-up. As a consequence, every really deep scientist must necessarily have religious feeling.”

The trouble with scientists like Monod is that they are so happy with the answers they have found to the questions they are asking that they have not noticed other questions, equally important. They assume that because they can explain certain phenomena, there cannot be a plan behind the universe.

Every day of our lives we show that this is not so. We use the products of technology in our homes and offices and factories. And every time we do we set in motion a process that can be explained along the lines of Monod’s atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of our own purpose. If this is true of our use of the products of technology, it is at least possible that a parallel exists on the cosmic scale.

Finally, it is not easy to see what Monod can possibly mean when he calls his system true. Truth is not a property of matter. Conceivably one might speak of one’s thoughts as “chemically correct.” But if there is ultimately nothing but matter, what does it mean to say that anything is true? Our very use of the concept of truth proclaims our certainty that matter is not everything.

Indeed, if ultimately there is nothing but matter, how can we be sure that anything is true (granted that we can put meaning into the word “true”)? On this view we would hold all our opinions on the basis of the behavior of certain atoms and molecules. Because they react in such and such a way, we would express such and such a conclusion. We would have no way of knowing whether we were right or not. We could do no more than register the end result of a mechanism.

If Monod is right, we can have no way of knowing it, for if his thesis is correct he is not giving us the result of a careful weighing of the evidence. He is simply reporting what the molecules tell him to report. His method is self-defeating.

Science and religion have much to learn from each other. The man of faith must always be on his guard against intruding dogmatically into the scientist’s legitimate sphere. But he is entitled to ask in return that the scientist refrain from using his dogmas to dispose of awkward religious questions.